Sua SponteMy law school odyssey: the ongoing narrative.
Today's mail brought not only the blue PMBR book bequeathed to me out of the goodness of a reader's heart (thank you, HB! and huzzah for blogs enabling this kind of distributive goodwill!), but a particular piece of paper I'd been looking forward to receiving for several weeks now. There, inside the priority mail envelope, tucked into the silk corners of a maroon leather folder bearing a gold crest, was my law school diploma.
I have long had issues with diplomas. For many years I couldn't even bear to look at the one I got upon graduating college. For one thing, it was ugly as sin. Also, I didn't graduate with my class, a decision which greatly disturbed me back in 1996. I was exasperated with the indulgent and meaningless life of the undergraduate, but at the same time, I wasn't quite done living it yet. And then all my friends were still in school and there I was, temping in Manhattan for a starvation wage and wondering what the hell had happened to my life.
Even now, nearly a decade later, I'm still embarrassed by that awful diploma. I thought it might just have looked ugly through the misery-colored glasses I wore for most of 1996, but I gave it a glance last week while we were unpacking and nope, it's objectively ugly. Repulsive. Not a hint of color, not a flake of gold leaf on the embossed university seal. It's laid out in BIG BLOCK LETTERS with huge fanglike serifs and the entire text in Latin, even the frickin name of the university. (Have you ever seen one of these monstrosities? Here's an example. Mine is just as bad.) Framing other diplomalike things to hang alongside it -- my college certificate, my master's degree -- didn't make my B.A. any more presentable. Eventually it went back into the box where it remains to this day.
My law school diploma, on the other hand, is adorable. The name of the university appears in white lettering on a field of maroon, the entire diploma is laid out in (gasp!) more than one font size, and the school seal is embossed in gold rather than by one of those tacky notary-public-style paper crimpers. It's entirely in English, even the perplexing words "Doctor of Law" where one would normally expect to find "Juris Doctor." My one complaint is that the thing is just so small: it's exactly 8.5" x 11", which gives rise to the distressing presumption that it was just fed through an ordinary laser printer. (My father's law degree, by contrast, takes up half a wall and nearly collapses under the weight of the calligraphy and scrollwork adorning its money quotes. It's the kind of diploma that must have been rolled up and tied with a ribbon.)
Still, I'm quite happy with the little redhead. I've got big plans for it, which involve framing it and actually hanging it up somewhere prominent. In the meantime it's sitting on the windowsill, shining its light out into the living room. I had to hurry up and finish my Community Property outline before the thing hypnotized me into complete distraction. You're just too good to be true...can't take my eyes off of you.
It's good to have it here now, to remind me: this was the point. Law school, learning law, picking up everything that we'll take with us on the long haul. Not the bar exam, not the silly essays and crazy multiple-choice questions and faux canned alarmism, but this.
After a few days, the dust finally settled. I'd graduated law school, the guests had gone home, the movers had cleaned out our apartment, a final dinner date had been set with W. and LawFairy, and my husband and I were booked on flights to opposite coasts early Tuesday morning. Only one thing remained on my to-do list: to bid a proper farewell to the water, which had so kindly accommodated my lotuslike roots for these past two years.
I walked through the park, down to the waterfront, down to the harbor where the masts of anchored sailboats clanked faintly like distant windchimes. This was my waterfront, the view from my living room window, company on my commute. And now I was leaving it. Of course I couldn't take it with me, but I could leave a bit of myself behind.
First I grasped an old sand dollar, collected from Ocean Beach at a particularly introspective moment. "This is from the Pacific Ocean, where I was," I told the lake, then broke the sand dollar in half and dropped it into the water, with a small discreet pair of splashes. Splip. splip.
Next came a handful of fragile thin mother-of-pearls, collected during various Florida beach strolls at Christmastime. "And these are from the Atlantic Ocean," I murmured, "where I'm headed next." I crushed them and let go, the fragments hitting the water like rain, making almost no noise at all.
And then it was time to part with my last security blanket, the small prescription bottle that had long served as my talisman against fear. The same nine Xanax with which I had faced down 1L, now nearly five years expired, spilled into an insignificant little pile in my hand. These nine tiny pink pills were always there in my medicine cabinet in case I needed them. Their mere presence was enough: knowing they were there, I managed to get by the entire time without them.
"1L was so hard," I told the lake, as I dropped the first pill into the water with a plip.
"Exams were so hard." Plip.
"Grades...were so hard." Plip.
"But then there was moot court." Plip.
"And then I came here." Plip.
"And I got a job." Plip.
"And a clerkship." Plip.
"And then I made law review." Plip.
"And now I've graduated, with honors." Plip.
I paused for a moment. The boats clanked, passersby jogged or biked or walked dogs, and the lapping water and I together pondered just how far I'd come. How much the good outweighed the bad. I couldn't be much luckier, I thought. The lake agreed: I looked down into it, and saw it smiling right back at me with a face much like my own, only made of water.
"I won't forget you," I told it, choking up.
The end of a Good Era means leaving behind so many things of beauty: my beloved adoptive law school, the city's magnificent skyline, our favorite teahouse, even the glorious walk through the park (although this will now have to substitute for this). Even if the era to come will also be a Good Era, it still marks the end of this one.
I'll miss you, Good Place, no matter how many other times in my life I may find myself in a good place. And I will not forget you.
It is nine o'clock at night, my cap and gown are long since returned to the university bookstore, but I have yet to take off my hood.
It's purple. It's heavy and velvet and purple with a maroon lining and then a black other lining or something. It's actually a fairly tangled mess of varicolored cloth, and nobody is quite sure how the thing is supposed to hang. During the hooding ceremony, Professor Equal Protection accidentally put mine on upside down, which wasn't much help as I tried to figure out how it was meant to drape. (The good Prof's own hood came from Harvard Law, which uses a unique model, so he's excused.) "No, it's supposed to go like this," advised Adam, arranging the (now properly-oriented) maroon lining to bouff out beneath the small of my back. "Are you sure?" my husband and stepmother wondered, opining that it had looked better when it hadn't resembled a Victorian bustle. Adam was fairly sure.
I didn't care. I thought the hood was one of niftiest pieces of clothing I'd ever worn, however it hung. By the end of the day (yes, I even wore it out to dinner over my dress and heels) I'd taken to calling it my Supercape. "We're with Batman," my father-in-law informed the restaurant hostess with a wink.
Ours is one of a handful of universities which deviate from the Intercollegiate Bureau of Academic Costume standards (the U.C.C. of caps and gowns). Here, the J.D. gown is maroon with black velvet trim instead of the standard-issue black, and comes with an adorable octagonal velvet tam. I loved it. I loved it even when the sun came out and the temperature cracked ninety and R. and I agreed that we were going to die, right then. The tam alone was totally worth heatstroke.
But the school, ever a class act, had our backs. Each chair in the quad had a fresh bottle of water stowed beneath it. The basement of the large chapel where we queued up for the hooding ceremony featured giant ice tubs full of yet more bottled water. And the treats got even better as we took our seats upstairs in the pews. "Look! Goodie bags!" someone exclaimed. Sure enough, the law school had left each of us a school-logo-embossed bag of school-logo-embossed Fabulous Parting Gifts: a leatherbound copy of the Constitution, a pewter desktop business card holder, and a tin of Jelly Bellies.
The hoods were ours to keep as well. I decorated mine with tac pins: a little American flag, the crest of my debating Society, and even, over Adam's objections, the crest of my undergraduate college. Of course the hood needed power-ups to be a proper Supercape. As hot as it got, as long as the day was, as many times as I dozed off on the couch between the ceremony and dinner, I never once took it off. It probably could use a dry cleaning now. That's fine; there's time.
My regalia featured one more detail that no one else's did. Several years back, my stepmother had given me an old black-and-white photograph of my father in his twenties; it had served as my 1L moot court talisman, and when I transferred here, I promised myself I would carry it at graduation. "You can't do that," my father-in-law informed me. "It says on the website that you can't carry any personal items."
"Let them try and stop me," said I.
But nobody did. Dad hung out with all the J.D.s as we milled around the gymnasium, marched with us across the campus as we followed the bagpipe band (the bagpipe band!) to the quad, and sat with me during the speeches and giving of degrees. (He saved my seat while I went up on stage to claim the diploma, since I figured I'd need both hands.) He then tagged along to the chapel basement, politely declined a bottle of water, and accompanied me up through the high vaulted chamber to the pews and the chancel. And he got to take in the view outward from the stage while my upside-down Supercape was first bestowed upon me. I hope he liked it.
As it turned out, I had to give back not only my gown and beloved tam, but my diploma as well: the law school distributed graduation honors two days before commencement, which I guess didn't leave them enough time to feed our degrees back through the laser printer before handing them to us this morning. S'aright s'aright; it'll probably be a nice pick-me-up to get the thing in the mail a month from now, when I'm deep down in the Barbri dumps. And as bad as my multiple-choice error rate may get, I'll still have my Supercape in the closet should the need arise. Heck, I may wear it to the bar exam.
Which I'm not going to worry about, just yet.
Picture two people.
One is a law student midway through her first year at a large state university law school. She has just learned that she did poorly on one of her exams. People tell her that the low grade doesn't matter, and objectively, in terms of things like her health, it doesn't; but she had plans, and now those look a lot less likely. By way of consolation, the professor who gave her the lousy grade advises her that even though she probably won't be a first-round draft pick at "firms like Pillsbury Madison," if she sticks to her guns and works hard enough in the first few years of her career, she can lateral in to biglaw just as the original hires are starting to burn out.
("Bah!" snorted St. Daniel. "He's full of shit, and it's Pillsbury Winthrop, now, anyway.")
The other woman wears an unusual necklace: a heavy gold pendant with various odd things embossed on it, including a Latin motto she adopted for herself in the latter half of her 1L year. Omnia superat, it reads. When people ask her what this means, she translates it as either "overcomes everything" or "that which is greater than all things."
A professor once advised her that if only she worked hard enough, she could overcome her own failings. She has taken that advice to heart, and worked, and worked, and worked. She transferred law schools, got a job offer at an excellent law firm (not Pillsbury, ah well) and earned a clerkship. She wrote on to law review, worked in her school's most fascinating clinic, won a prize for her efforts there. And now, after arriving in town for graduation, she checks her email and learns that she will be graduating with honors.
Omnia superat.
Believe this. I will not lie and say that anything can be achieved with enough work: there are plenty of people who work and work and work and don't get lucky. But I will say this: with a whole lot of work and just enough luck, anything is possible.
Forty-two hours later and still no signs of life from the web server. I give up. I'm just going to have to fly back to school and go pester the registrar in person.
Oh, and graduate.
Off to the airport!
Fifteen hours later and the server is still down. But as it turns out, this isn't just the server for the grades website. It's the machine "providing functionality to many University web applications," including the mail server.
So not only is it as impossible for the registrar to upload grades as it is for us to access them, now they can't send out the graduating students list either. Does anyone else find this extraordinarily black-humorous?
UPDATE: At 10:16 am the failure page was updated to announce that "Hardware has been identified to restore the failed system." Holy crap. Something actually melted in there.
UPDATE: I'm getting mail again, so maybe the mail server thing was a fluke. The grades server, though, is still as fried as your brain on drugs. The best news the failure page can offer, as of 5:35 pm, is that folk with mad skills "have been working throughout the day to rebuild and reconfigure the web server. We will post updates early tomorrow on our status."
Bah, who needs grades to graduate anyway?
I realized, as I unpacked my bag today at Barbri, that I had forgotten my laptop power cable at home. I haven't done this in years, and never with Ye Olde Blacke Boxe.
Fortunately YOBB has a supplemental battery in the CD-ROM bay, which had spent all of last night charging to full capacity. And fortunately, today's lecture was Criminal Law, full of pauses and practice questions during which I could quickly put the machine to sleep. (The lecturer's gravelly voice repeatedly reminded me of Trekkie Monster's from Avenue Q. I dare you to imagine the good professor singing "The Internet is for Porn" and not laugh.)
I dimmed the display to deep gray and disconnected the wifi card, to stretch the battery life as far as it was willing to go. Fortunately, it was only fifteen minutes shy of the end of the lecture when the supplemental battery finally crapped out on me. But the dim screen gave me a minor headache, and the lack of wifi meant that I had to go several very long hours without pinging the grades website.
Dashing home and plugging in was scant help, as it turned out: no sooner did I hit the link than I found myself redirected to a failure page. Apparently, while I was off squeaking through an entire afternoon of Barbri on battery power, everyone else had continued to reload the grades website until the server crashed outright.
Ah well, I told myself. Discipline. This was clearly a sign from On High that I should be spending these last few daylight hours focusing, ignoring the siren song of the grades site, and writing the graded Torts essay that's due tomorrow.
So I did. (And can I just say: that fact pattern was lifted from my Privacy exam. Who knew that Privacy was a bar course? At least I felt reasonably prepared for it...that exam was only, what, two weeks ago?)
And now here it is, nine-thirty, too dark to read without standing in the galley kitchen. After completing and mailing off the Torts essay, I spent a half hour on the phone with my mom, and then made a makeshift dinner of marinated mushrooms, soy-flaxseed tortilla chips and chipotle hummus. Now I'm sitting in the recliner, feet up, nursing a cappuccino mugful of vinho verde...and the grades website is still dead. My repeated reloading of the failure page is apparently not helping, either.
"I refuse to look!" says LawFairy, as emphatically as one can over instant messenger. "I'm just going to wait until the graduating students list comes out. Maybe then I'll look."
I need the patience of LawFairy, or at least her fatalism. I need to stop being interested in grades. Because as long as I am, and as long as I can't reach mine, the buzz I'm getting from this vinho verde is going to waste.
Every day I slip further behind in the Barbri Paced Program. The road trip, then the paper, then the task of getting this apartment into something like livable shape have each resulted in an incremental few days' procrastination. And today's double class in Contracts knocked the remaining stuffing out of my attention span once and for all; if I haven't yet summited the peak of uselessness, right now I'm damn close.
I'll start the multiple choice juggernaut tonight, I tell myself each evening on the subway ride home. But as soon as twilight sets in, the only sources of light in the apartment are either the galley kitchen (an unworkable study space), the bathrooms (somewhat less so), or the Christmas-tree lights on my living room windows. Oh, and the little scented candles, I guess. Maybe I'll start the multiple choice tomorrow after all, when it's light out. Or maybe in a few days I'll really knuckle down. Maybe after graduation, or after the movers arrive with all the boxes. When there's time.
Meanwhile, the stack of Barbri books is currently serving as a makeshift coffee table on which to rest my cappuccino mug of shiraz. And I've fallen prey to that most pointless-yet-addictive of time sinks: repeatedly reloading the law school grades website, waiting for mine to post.
So far, two fresh numbers have appeared on my electronic transcript: Class Actions, which made me smile, and Privacy, which (as expected) made me shrug. Four blanks remain: my yearlong seminar, the clinic, the seminar for which I just handed in the paper, and, oddly enough, First Amendment, which should have posted last quarter but never did. The grade submission deadline was yesterday. I am entirely convinced that I'm going to graduate law school no matter how the numbers shake down, so none of this news is of any consequence to me.
I think that's *why* it's so fascinating. Grades used to matter, and were therefore loaded with fear; as time passed, they came to matter less and less, shedding the fear in clumps and eventually diminishing to the level of mere trivia. Now, when their chances of representing bad news approach zero, my grades are almost completely decontextualized: a law school game, a real life version of Cubis or Snood. And now that I can exert no further influence over the outcome, my number-watching is only about fun. Can I beat my high score? Might I even level? Or will someone finally call my bluff?
Refresh.
Refresh.
Refresh.
We shall see.
A few days before my Privacy exam, a small hole wore through the right knee on my favorite jeans. "Don't worry about it," odderie counseled me, "little holes like that are coming back into style." But the hole, perhaps resenting the constraints of fashion, ripped larger and larger every time I stopped to fill my gas tank on the drive to Boston. By the time I arrived, it was a good four inches wide.
I needed new jeans. I needed lots of things; I still had to sign the lease on our new apartment, pick up my Barbri books, make a grocery run and catch up on several days' Barbri reading and write the last five pages that law school will ever require of me. And time had decided to be unfriendly to me this week, tweaking the weather and the traffic and fraying the fabric of my days until each of these efforts took about five times longer than it should have.
Eventually everything got done, as it had to. I have now signed the lease. (The chinchillas and I move from my friends' house into the empty echoing apartment this Wednesday. A Target run is in order soon thereafter.) I have picked up all fifty pounds of my Barbri books. I have invested $25 in a pair of Old Navy jeans, and $40 in a Trader Joe's haul that finally resulted in the lasagna I've been meaning to make since January. I'm still a few days behind in my Barbri reading, but mirabile dictu, it looks like my last paper of law school is finally written.
The seminar instructors had originally asked for at least a thousand words; this monster currently weighs in at 2,336. I could probably keep going, if only to stay in law school just a few moments longer. But it's time. I should be relearning torts, not clinging to the last loose threads of an experience that deserves a neat and tidy end. I will let these two-thousand-plus words mellow overnight, reread them in the morning, and email them off to the instructors after lunch tomorrow...
...and then law school will truly be over. Nothing left on the to-do list except graduation. Everything else on my schedule, no matter how pressing, is separate. The bar exam and publication-shopping and the clerkship all boast their own action items, but law school is concluding, once and for all.
As a graduation present, I bought myself this. I've never spent so much on a piece of furniture before, but after this year, these three years, I have no doubt that I earned it.
An eight hour takehome exam means you can go to the bathroom as many times as you want. Unlimited refills on the water bottle. Time enough to dash downstairs from the sixth-floor law review carrel (hypoallergenic and guaranteed to be vacant, unlike the third floor ones) and microwave up a quick lunch in the cafeteria. Even time enough to play a dozen or so rounds of Snood.
But an eight hour takehome exam means that all the Korean ginseng candies are gone by the end of the second hour. A Nutz Over Chocolate Luna bar, and then more undiluted chocolate, does little to offset the diminishing intellectual returns. Lunch fails entirely to stave off the lust for a nice nap. By hour 5 the library has gone strangely cold and clammy. By hour 6 the screen begins to blur, English sounds foreign (or at least poorly translated), and Piet's battery has died.
I lasted seven and a half hours, by the end of which I felt completely deflated. My answer came in at a tidy seven words under the limit, and if anything was still wrong with it, then it was staying that way. I could stare at this for another half hour and it would make no difference. Time to send it off and call it done.
Done.
This should feel like something. I am never taking another exam again that will be graded, counted toward an average or credited as the measure of my command of a subject. The only exams remaining in my entire life, as far as I can hope, are the California and Massachusetts bars. And those are pass-fail.
But there's no euphoria, no spike of surprise or joy. Not even relief. Just numb. So spent. So exhausted. Damn, am I glad I waited until my Last Law School Exam Ever to see what an eight-hour takehome felt like.
In any event, it's over. And tomorrow I hit the road.
A place I thought I'd never return: nighttime outside, yellow halogen light flooding the living room, and me, on the same couch, outlining. Again. For my really-truly final law school exam, the last one ever, and this time I mean it.
But until that exam ends (an event currently scheduled right around dinnertime tomorrow), I'm still here, in this little pocket of the universe, one more time. Same Microsoft Word templates, case grid, outline. Same lute music playing in the background. Same ravenous munchies: I've just finished a whole plastic bag of shredded cheese, am about to exceed my daily chocolate quota, and require all the willpower I can summon to conserve the rest of my Korean ginseng candies for the exam. Round about Hour Five or Six, I figure, is when I'll need them most.
"I HATE OUTLINING!" I hollered in my husband's general direction, for no good reason. "I'm not even supposed to be TAKING this exam!"
I'm certainly not supposed to be playing this wonderful new game, or chasing my high score on this old favorite. I'm supposed to be focusing. Tomorrow I go toe to toe with the last law school exam I'll ever take, and this time I mean it, and at the very least I need to avoid being bludgeoned into unconsciousness. Ideally, it'd be me doing the bludgeoning. Perhaps after enough coffee and Korean ginseng candies.
And outlining. Finishing this outline. The last one. Once and for all.
Damn it.
I can always count on law school, always, up until the last possible second (anyone want to place bets about random graduation-related weirdnesses?), to pull the rug out from under my feet. It must truly love me if it's this unwilling to let go.
Email from my spring seminar instructor:
JCA,
Your paper so far is extremely interesting, a most enjoyable read, and it'll obviously make a great article.
Hey, maybe they're sending me my grade. Looks like they liked the thing. This could be nice.
But what we have so far does not yet meet the requirements for a final paper for our IP class.
Cue Darth Vader hand-waving nooooooo!
We need a reasonably elaborated conclusion containing your prescriptions and normative evaluations (it may be an elaboration of the current sketch of Part V).
My submission consisted of a nearly-complete, fully-researched Part I plus a roadmap for the rest of the article (parts II-V). I suppose it makes sense that the seminar instructors would want to see where the whole thing is headed, rather than just read the beginning. Unfortunately, this means I now have to *decide* where it's headed. Maybe on the drive to Boston I'll have an epiphany?
For purposes of grading this paper, the conclusion section must be at least 1,000 words long, although you probably want to go beyond that minimum. The faculty's grades are due to the Registrar by Thursday, June 2. Therefore, we must have your conclusion section no later than 9:00 a.m. on June 2. Good luck!
Good luck is right. I'm trying to study right now for Monday's exam, my husband is bustling around the apartment packing noisily, and I'm still near tears over some heartbreaking news about a friend's pregnancy. Not exactly the best time to learn of yet another personal inadequacy. I mean, I appreciate these little stings to my ego, they're good for humility insurance and all; but for heaven's sakes, couldn't I just be done for once?
*sigh*. At least they gave me a generous timeframe. This will be dealt with after my Privacy exam, not before.
Remember the first day? Another time, another place, another person. A train. A freshly-printed student ID. Nerves that twanged like banjo strings. So much uncertainty. So much fear.
Today was my last day of law school, here, with no fear left, nothing more to run from, and finally, nothing more to chase. My law school odyssey -- or at least the good part -- has finally reached its inevitable end. And strangely enough, it's that inevitability that tastes strongest to me. I'm not overly wistful, regretful, or even tetchy or antsy to leave; instead, I'm struck by how this enormous, complex, extraordinary project simply couldn't have worked out any other way.
Professor Privacy spent the last class dizzily summarizing eight weeks' worth of material in an hour, which resulted in almost 100% class attendance for the first time in eight weeks. ("Is this a 3L class?" my husband wondered. "There are 2Ls in it too," I told him. "Awww, whatever, you're set," he opined, and then proceeded to argue that I should spend the weekend packing with him instead of studying.) Prof. Privacy adorably concluded that the law of privacy was not so much the Law of the Horse as an opportunity for us all to go out and create coherence. The applause was enthusiastic, even from the folks who had missed half the quarter.
Despite myself, I misted up. Throughout much of law school, professors had told us to seek truth and justice and stay ethical and take care of our families and so forth; but now, here, for the first time, was a guy who seemed to understand why I was there, why I work so hard, why I keep this blog even (which, for all I know, he reads -- Hi, Prof. Privacy!). My life, since I've been old enough to drive this car myself, has been about searching for direction, for focus, for underlying reasons and patterns and coherence. And now, on my last day of law school, here were my marching orders: go create coherence. Tease order out of the chaos. Yes. That would be the plan, all right. (And ideally, at least some of this coherence will emerge in time for the Privacy exam on Monday.)
And then came my last class ever, Class Actions, the last time I would sit in a classroom in this law school as a student. The afternoon was clear and sunny, Professor Class Actions repeatedly laughed his infectious laugh, and I tried to imprint every detail I could retain: the light hitting books on the shelves in the seminar room, the rainfall sound of keystrokes as we typed, the butterscotch smell of LawFairy's seven-layer bars. It was ending. Right in front of me, law school was ending.
We managed to prevail upon the professor to dismiss the two-hour seminar a half hour early by inviting him to join us at the cocktail hour upstairs before the graduating students' dinner. Inevitable. Law school could not have ended any other way.
On my first day of law school, I remember, as the sun set over the greenhills on my train ride home, it struck me how ripe everything felt: I knew I wanted to transfer schools and had an uphill battle ahead of me, but it all seemed perfectly possible. There was so much juice, so much sap, such intense enrichment to be drawn from law school. I could do this. I was ready to do it. I was raring to go. This was going to be an adventure unequaled in my life.
And it was. And it could not have been any other way.
I proceeded to get rip-roaring drunk at the graduating students' dinner, juicing the experience to its last. This made it perhaps all the more surprising when, midway through dessert, the dean of the law school read off a list that included my name. Apparently I'd won a class prize for my work in the clinic. "Who knew?" I giggled uncontrollably to my tablemates. "Who'da thunk?" But I guess everyone else in the clinic knew; I'd just been too busy writing motions (I've got three due Friday) to realize it. How much of the meta-context of law school have I missed, I wonder, just by staying buried too deeply in my work? I pondered a moment, downed another glass of chardonnay, and concluded: eh, probably not that much after all. It's all good. This is how it's supposed to work out. Could it have turned out otherwise?
Could it? Could I have stayed in California, remained at my old law school, citechecked there instead of here, possibly become an editor on their law review? Would I have retained my moot court mojo and gone on to win national acclaim on their extramural team? Or would that bright-white transcendence have eluded me there just as here? Could I have done better in moot court here, stood for office in my debating society, gotten an article published? Baked more cookies? Made lasagna for my friends here? Traveled more over spring break? Studied more? Studied less?
No.
With very few and trivial exceptions, if I had this to do over again, it would turn out exactly the same. I wouldn't change a thing that was within my control. And even though the things that weren't might turn out differently simply because they're beyond my influence, I'd still put my money on karma. This is how it was supposed to be. This is how we reached the destination. And now, this is the end of the line.
The sun is out. The heavy steel-gray storm clouds that thundered through my restitution hearing on Friday and loomed over my weekend paperwriting marathon have dispersed. I luckily managed to avoid getting caught in any actual rain, but right now that still doesn't make me feel any less like a drowned rat.
It's done. I mean, as much as it can be. The most aerobically intense stretch of uninterrupted sprinting I've had to achieve in law school -- tougher than the last week of summer, tougher than winter exams, tougher than the most time-taxing parts of 1L -- has just ended. All the clinic stuff (including oral argument!) from last week is done; Class Actions is done; my last cite check is, I believe, also done; and, less than an hour ago, I finally handed in the paper that's been hanging over my head since last spring. (Or rather, handed in the first twenty-odd pages of it plus an outline of the rest. The whole thing is hopefully destined to become a law review article at some point in the future, once the bar exam has been dealt-with. See, I just couldn't imagine not having that incompleted project on my to-do list.)
There are a few fragments of law school left, but these are failing to produce even the slightest blips on my worry-dar. I've got a Privacy exam in a week, but it's an eight-hour takehome, which just feels like plenty of time to write a wee little exam after all the verbiage I managed to pump out in the last few days. I've got a filing to produce for my fourth clinic case, plus some follow-on research after Friday's restitution hearing, but this doesn't even feel like school at all. This is work. This is lawyering. This is what I'm going to be doing for a living. Research and filings, law review articles as side projects. I have now phased neatly into the first day of the rest of my life.
The incompleteness of the seminar paper itches a little, though. On one hand, it's my own fault that the thing is going to be dozens and dozens of pages longer than I'd anticipated; if I wanted closure, I should have picked a less involved topic. And the seminar instructors are perfectly happy to base my grade on a partial draft, since I'm no longer asking for substantial writing credit. But on the other hand, closure seems like it would feel awfully nice right now.
Or would it? Would I even notice? Spent and exhausted and caffeine-twitching, in the same pajamas on the same couch, drinking my vanilla soy milk straight from the carton: am I really in any condition to appreciate something actually ending, or would it just feel like a blank space, an empty socket from which the plug had finally been pulled?
Would it even feel like closure at all, given how there's always, always something else next in line to be done? More clinic work! Packing for the move to Boston! The Privacy exam! Hopping in the car after the exam and roadtripping for 15 straight hours to get to BarBri on time! Dashing back here for graduation and the near-simultaneous supervision of our movers! And then onward, onward to the bar exam! There is no closure on the treadmill, not so long as you're still moving. Death is closure. As long as I'm alive, and right now my pulse is still indicating that I am, I'll never really know how it feels to be truly done with the to-do list.
Even so: I will now have my amaro, my traditional ending ritual. I have been saving this bottle for a year to toast the completion of this paper. Technically, in terms of amaro milestones, this marks the end of my 2L year. Funny how it's (a) actually the end of my 3L year, which never quite felt like a 3L year anyway; and (b) not even the end of the paper, which may not even see a draft in its entirety this year. That's fine, though. I don't really like the taste of amaro, anyway.
For no particular reason I just kept on going. I ran clear to the ocean. And when I got there, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well turn around, just keep on going. When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going. -- Forrest Gump
Keep right on going.
Things that are done as of today:
- Apple memorandum.
- Blueberry status hearing.
- Visit to Cantaloupe in prison.
- Draft 1, Class Actions paper.
- Law review proofread.
- Final paper for Judge Long Distance.
- Apartment hunt in Boston. (yay!)
- Long-awaited, desperately-needed new haircut and color. (YAY!)
Stuff that I had to miss, to get this done:
- Bar review.
- My debating society's annual banquet.
- Law school prom (leaving me 0 for 3).
- Numerous pleasant evenings with my husband.
- At least four days' worth of gym workouts.
- Copious hours of sleep.
Things that must be done by this time next week:
- Cantaloupe restitution hearing.
- Date-Nut memorandum. (Of course it got remanded this weekend. grrr.)
- Draft 2, Class Actions paper.
- Twenty-five page seminar paper.
- Final law review cite check.
Stuff that I refuse to miss out on, even so:
- My debating society's annual alumni debate and end-of-term ceremonies.
- Vietnamese soup.
- Blackjack with a group of friends and a professor I've never had (another public-interest auction win).
- Law review banquet.
- Farewell party after the final meeting of Judge Long Distance's yearlong seminar.
- Graduating students banquet.
- Any more gym workouts than are absolutely necessary.
The flailing has commenced, but I'm not feeling smacked-down just yet. With enough caffeine and chocolate and water, I'll make it through to the end of this week, no matter how much thrashing through the figurative underbrush that requires.
Seven days was all she wrote.
Remember that game we used to play, as very young children? I've heard it called "hand sandwich," but your name for it may vary. It involves at least a pair of people, but can scale a bit as well. The first person plants one of her hands, palm down, on a flat surface. Slap! Another plants hers, also palm down, on top of the first. Slap! All participants do the same, then the circle repeats, with the first player planting her other hand on top of the pile, then the next person, then the next. Slap! Slap! When the turn cycles back to the first person for a third time, she pulls her hand out from underneath the stack and slaps it onto the top. Slap! All the others do likewise, eventually devolving into a general flailing of hands and much merriment.
I feel like a hand in the hand sandwich, this week: surrounded by friendly excitement, yes, but also beaten up and squashed.
Yesterday afternoon was the intramural moot court finals, at which I had garnered a coveted seat by attending the semifinals back in February. Slap! I couldn't go, though, because I had class, the once-a-week seminar where attendance actually counts. Slap! But I couldn't even go to class, because I had a conference call scheduled with a clinic client and Judge Local. This, ironically, wound up not even happening, as nobody at the Bureau of Prisons seems willing to answer a phone after 5 pm. Judge Local and I sat there for about ten minutes, listening to the phone ring, before finally giving up. Slap! Slap!
I also meant to knock off my last paper for Judge Long Distance's seminar yesterday, a five-pager due this coming Monday. I really want to see it done before the weekend in any event -- I'll be in Boston on Monday and won't necessarily have reliable Internet access. Slap! Meanwhile, I've been assigned a galley proofread for law review: not the cite check I'd long ago scheduled for next week, but an impromptu thing dropped in my lap on Sunday evening. Slap! This is also due Monday, and equally (if not more) impossible to do from Boston (or, for that matter anywhere outside the lawbrary). No problem, right? I'd get it done before quittin' time, no problem. Slap! Slap! At ten-thirty I gave up for the night and drove home, leaving the remaining two-thirds of the task for today. Or something. Slap!
Today was hardly better: I've got a filing due in one of my clinic cases -- let's call it United States v. Apple -- next Wednesday. Since I'll be out of town from Saturday through Tuesday, this means that Judge Local needs the draft in hand before I leave. Slap! Unfortunately, a large chunk of the Apple case file had mysteriously gone missing from the clinic. Including, inevitably, the transcript from Apple's sentencing hearing. Slap! So I had to spend this morning at the federal building, the only place where the necessary docs are available for public viewing. That's the same federal building where I'll be appearing tomorrow morning for the status hearing in United States v. Blueberry, after which Judge Local and I will head over to the local pen to meet with the formerly-absent defendant in United States v. Cantaloupe. Slap! Slap!
If I'm not careful, things will quickly degenerate into a great deal of incoherent flailing.
Fortunately -- well, lots of things are fortunate. The seminar instructor to whom I owe my last long paper has shown a blessed willingness to be flexible on things like page limits and deadlines. Judge Local himself has agreed not only to double the clinic credits I expected to earn this year, but also to sign off on a Substantial Writing certification for all these filings. This is no longer necessary for me to graduate, as my school only requires two Substantials, but it's a sweet gesture of appreciation nonetheless: you've been working like a dog for this clinic, JCA, and at the very least you should get a little asterisk on your transcript for it. It beats a box of chocolates any day.
But the best thing, as always, is the love I get from my priceless friends. D. laughed out loud at me this afternoon as I rattled through my to-do list over a Cinco de Mayo tequila and Squirt. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I just can't feel sorry for you of all people. You totally bring all this on yourself. You're like thank you, sir, may I have another!" She bent over for effect and *oops* swung her arm straight into J.'s empty can of Diet Coke, which wound up clattering to the floor with a large dent in it. "Um," said D., "I guess that's my cue."
But not the curtain call, not yet. If all the work means that I'm still here, even for just a few more weeks, then I'll take it gladly.
And chugging wine at night, tea right now, and water whenever I remember to refill my glass. Hydration is important. Can't forget hydration.
I didn't go to the gym yesterday. It's looking like I may not make it today either. But after three days of cranking, I now have ten pages of a draft final paper for Class Actions. I have high hopes for this thing; on a reread after a good night's rest, it appears to suck less than I feared. Even if I'm wrong about that, it's only a first draft. Most importantly, it's done.
Little milestones make the trip seem -- not shorter, but at least as though it's progressing. Going somewhere. I ordered an official transcript recently for an advisor who requested it and haven't passed it along yet; it's so nice to be able to look over at it while I'm writing, count up all the credits and the asterisks, and realize that I'm really graduating. My hours and writing requirements have all been met. All I've got to do is hand in a few more papers by May 16, survive one exam on May 23, and that's it. I'm done.
Of course, I'm lying. That's not "it." The clinic's appetite for my free time is approaching Little Shop of Horrors. And in addition to the cite check I owe law review next week, I've just been passed a galley to proofread (my first time hand-correcting a piece) as well. Maybe I can do it on the plane to Boston this weekend. Things are never as simple as I'd like to make them seem.
But I've got a draft of one paper done, and right now that makes everything else seem a little less daunting. For the moment, at least.
I'm not a lawyer yet. This is no secret: most law students aren't. I have a Little Lawyer License that enables me to appear before the courts of this state as a Senior Law Student, but I've never claimed to be a member of the bar. Never had reason to.
Nor has this been a problem, until now.
One of my clinic clients, the one whose hearing last week got continued, is currently awaiting his new court date at a federal facility downtown. His lawyer, as in the full-fledged member of the bar who represents him, is entitled to visit him there. People who aren't members of the bar, on the other hand, have to go through a background check before we're granted authorization to interact with federal inmates.
Fair enough, I figured. Of course they'll want to make sure I'm a real law student supervised by a real lawyer and not just some random friend of the defendant.
But the form asked not only for my name, address, and Social Security number, but also for my hair color, eye color, height and weight.
And they need this to confirm what, exactly?
Even the California Bar, which sees fit to probe way more of my past than is reasonably necessary (does my 1996 Hoboken landlord really have anything substantive to tell them?), never asked me what I weighed. I can't imagine why they'd need to know it. First of all, the number changes daily. Second, it doesn't really tell you anything about my physical appearance; it's neither big enough to indicate on paper that I'm fat, nor small enough to tell the casual reader that I'm skinny. And yet they'd asked, and "None of your business" was not an answer that would get me clearance to meet with my client.
So I did what any lady would have done: I rounded down.
I used to be plagued by my fairies: the fear fairy would always keep me keyed up, the guilt fairy would make sure I stayed religious about getting stuff done, and the dear old self-loathing fairy would lash me into humility whenever my britches started to get a bit tight. The fairies were the kind of friends that few friends have the nerve to be, the ones who will spare you no honesty, even if it means leaving you fretful and miserable. They know you'll thank them later. (And if you think *I'm* too into the melodrama, you should hear them in full rant.)
I used to be plagued by my fairies, and now, when I most need them, they're gone.
I can't not be writing a paper right now. I can't be doing things this week like going to the gym and eating out and seeing movies with friends. There's just not enough time to get everything done, and this is it, the true home stretch, the last bit of law school that's ever going to count. I need the guilt fairy to keep me focused, the fear fairy to keep me energized. I could even use the self-loathing fairy, if only because the thrill of telling her I told you so is often incentive enough for me to do the near-impossible.
But right now my mind is still lavender-relaxed and purring contentedly after a month of beautiful, beautiful downtime. (I finally understand what people meant when they would talk about law school as a vacation. That month was priceless.) I need the fairies to help get me back on track, and I have no clue where they've gone. I can't possibly have outgrown or out-matured them. They must just be as lazy as I am.
I'm going to have to find a way to alarm myself without them, then. Omphaloskeptic contentment just doesn't have the horsepower to propel me through forty pages and a filing and a proofread and a citecheck and two hearings and a househunt in the next two weeks.
Unfortunately, neither does alcohol.
I sat down after lunch and decided that I'd see my ten-page Class Actions paper finished today.
It is now 12:30 am, and I'm up to page 3.
I suck at late nights. In college I used to be able to dash out to my favorite cafe, pick up an iced cap, and be good for an allnighter chatting online with friends in Germany and Italy. Ten years later, I'm barely into my thirties, but once midnight rolls around I'm either falling asleep on my feet or raiding the fridge. It doesn't help that my husband has such good taste in snack food, either: we've got all wonder of smoked fish and marinated olives and cheese and stoned-wheat crackers, happy to spring to life and tempt me once it's sufficiently late. Oh, and wine too, which can't help.
At least the paper's underway, which is more than I could have said for it this morning.
If it really is May now -- and the calendar tells me it is, unless April finally managed to grow a 31st -- then certain things are now inescapably true. In the next sixteen days, I will need to:
1. Go to court twice, on two successive Fridays, to argue for two successive resentencings before two different judges.
2. Draft and file a resentencing position memorandum in a third case before a third judge. (I have four of these total. It'll be just my luck that the fourth will suddenly require attention in the next two weeks as well.)
3. Fly to Boston this coming weekend. Sometime between touchdown on Saturday and liftoff on Tuesday afternoon, sign a lease.
4. Write that seminar paper that's been on the to-do list for over a year. It is no longer due in the distant future. It is due on May 16, which is sixteen days from today. Even though it no longer needs to qualify for graduation writing-requirement credit, which shaves at least five pages off the expected total length, it's still going to be pretty damn long. By itself this would probably take a week or so. But I also have to...
5. Write another paper, this one thankfully shorter (capped at 10 pages) for Class Actions. This is less of a worry-about-it, more of a just-do-it project. (Assuming I can motivate myself to just do it.) As is...
6. My last paper for Judge Long Distance, a mere 5 pages on a book I finished last week. I'd have done this already if I could think of anything substantive to say about the book. Unfortunately, every commentary on family law I can think of immediately devolves into an anecdote about my own family. I suppose it could be worse; at least this book was interesting.
7. I've got one more law review citecheck on deck as well, but can't remember exactly when it starts. Probably, with my luck, while I'm in Boston.
I've had such a lovely relaxing April that none of these suddenly-imminent deadlines seems real. Especially since the rest of the world is now well-immersed in exam season, if not already done with exams entirely. Three weeks of re-ramped intensity just doesn't quite fit anywhere in my life at this point.
It also didn't help that, on the way home from court on Wednesday, I stopped in a Bath and Body Works and impulse-bought an aromatherapy diffuser. Plugged into an outlet in our bedroom, this item proceeded to saturate our entire apartment with a scent called "Sleep: Lavender and Vanilla." This turned out to be accurate on all three counts. The lavender and vanilla smelled lovely, but the sleep overcame us like a silent illness. Within two days my husband and I went from energetic gymgoers to somnolent zombies. I'd get up in the morning at 10:30 or so, stumble out to the living room, sit down on the couch, and immediately curl up and nod back off. Hubby wouldn't even bother getting out of bed in the first place. (W. now calls the stuff "VapoCrack.")
"We need to unplug that thing," my husband decided yesterday afternoon at the grocery store. "Just breathing at home is putting me to sleep."
"Seriously," I agreed. "I meant to get so much done this weekend...I have all these papers...but I can't keep my eyes open."
"Me neither!"
"And even though I know how much I've got to do, I can't even make myself worry about it. It's just like ahhh, whatever, it'll happen eventually."
"Exactly!" Neither of us normally thinks this way. We were clearly under the influence of something untimely.
The diffuser has now been unplugged. I feel more awake already.
Now, for the last-mile sprint!
You guys are not all really taking exams right now. Exams don't happen for another month. I'm obviously having one of those stupid nightmares where the truth seems to grow thinner and thinner, the more everyone around me insists that reality is other than what I know it to be. But you will not make me panic. Exam season is in MAY, people. NEXT MONTH. Now go back to class, the quarter's only halfway over.
Among my dozen-or-so well-worn, much-loved Rachmaninoff CDs is a recording of a cantata called Vesna, which good authority would have me believe is Russian for "spring." (Of course these are the same folks who tell me that Zima means "winter," so take that with as many grains of salt as needed.) Vesna is a long baritone aria, periodically punctuated with the kind of choral narration typical to Greek drama, except that this chorus sings in Russian. In fact, they open the piece with a burst of Russian that literally knocked my friend Peter over with laughter: "Idyot-gudyot, zelonyi shum, vesennyi shum!" He will still call me an idyot-gudyot every so often, when the mood strikes him.
At any rate, Vesna is the operatic story of a fellow who gets snowed in, goes a bit stir crazy, and decides, upon learning of her youthful indiscretion with another man, that he's going to kill his wife. Cue chorus ooohing to mimic the wind. Our hero (according to the liner notes; my Russian is limited to words like da and vodka) hears voices in his head, which continually sing along with the wind, instructing him: kill, kill the betrayer! Finally, when he can no longer stand it, he picks up the sharpest knife he can find...
...and suddenly notices that the spring has arrived.
The howling wind abruptly shifts to a major key, and there's the chorus again, pianissimo, reminding Peter what an idyot-gudyot I am. (Apparently it means "They come, the sounds of green, the sounds of spring." And I'll have another vodka, spasibo.) The seasonally-affected baritone drops the knife, the chorus crescendoes in a nice Rachmaninoff flourish, and eventually everyone is belting out poetry about love and forgiveness and making hay while the sun shines, or whatever the analogous activity is in Russian. Even the tympanist gets some action. Go the tympanist.
Here they come, the sounds of green, the sounds of spring!
It has become damn near impossible to focus on school. When I'm not doped up on allergy medicine, I'm doped up on the sheer glee of relaxation, of stepping off the treadmill and feeling my heart rate slow back to normal. After years of beating the crap out of me and/or driving me to unhealthy levels of exertion, law school has finally taken a chill pill. I've been indulging in lots of naps, which feel wasteful until I realize exactly how much (a) I need them and (b) this time in my life was intended, and designed, exactly for this purpose.
There's still stuff to do, of course. I've got several papers hanging over my head, although I've gotten kind of used to them there, ringing like lightweight-Damoclean wind chimes. Classes, meanwhile, have begun playing pranks on me: the Privacy class I thought I skipped a week ago was in fact cancelled. The class I actually wound up skipping was the makeup, scheduled for lunch today. I arrived at school at 2:30, as usual, only to have Law Fairy immediately sound the alarm: "You're going to get called on in Privacy today!"
"Yeah, probably," I shrugged.
"No," she persisted, "you got called on during the makeup class during lunch."
"The makeup class during lunch," I repeated stupidly. Yeah, I'd heard that such a thing was scheduled to happen, some time long ago last week when something so far in the future as today was unimaginable. And now Professor Privacy had called my name and found an empty seat. I thought for a moment about how bad this had made me look. "Maybe I should just go home. Or go do some clinic stuff."
But I wound up going to class anyway, even though it meant preemptively apologizing to the professor for my previous absence (the "3L perp walk") so that he wouldn't call on me in a class for which I was now conclusively unprepared. I should probably be reading now, in case he decides to hit me up again tomorrow. Sigh. The fact that it's still hard to find the motivation to do so, even after experiencing public shame in absentia, tells you exactly how much of a spring-term 3L I am right now.
Fortunately the clinic keeps throwing me curveballs, all of which are unfortunately too confidential to blog about. (Although I can say that it will be exciting finally to meet one of my clients, a fellow currently on his way here from federal prison in Kentucky to attend Wednesday's hearing. He'll be there to watch me argue for his resentencing, in federal court, without a net. Send Booker waves.) The rest of my fellow 3Ls may have begun the long diminuendo into their last round of exams, but we've still got a month left, and at least there's one thing that Still Matters to keep me plugged in.
Although making some progress on the papers would be nice too.
Na zdorovie!
Snap! I hear over my shoulder as I idly play Cubis on an orange couch in front of the seminar rooms. Snap! Snap!
Today is the first day in many moons that the temperature in this famously cold city has cracked eighty degrees, and in celebration, half the school has broken out their flip flops. Snap! they repeat, reminding me in my jeans and ankle boots that I'm about a week out of synch once again.
I don't own flip flops. I do have some nice sandals, but a weekend spent walking around town with my stepmother has left my feet in a condition that should not see the light of day. It doesn't help that they haven't been pedicured since last summer, either. And while we're on the subject of giving money to spa personnel, I'm coming due for a wax within a week or two as well. Everyone else has it so easy; they can just wear shorts and flip flops whenever they feel like it. LawFairy was wearing a particularly cute miniskirt today over her own flip flops. I, meanwhile, am still in my winter clothes; I couldn't get away with a miniskirt in a hundred years, even if I had gone to the gym this morning (oops).
Boats are appearing in the harbor again. It's warm enough out that I've started leaving my coat in the car. Next step: leaving it home altogether. I'm sitting in the living room, typing this, laptop hot on my lap, floor fan circulating the dry dusty air around the room in a way that manages to keep me coughing despite plenty of Benadryl and Robitussin. (The coughing has driven me to spend more than one night asleep on the living room couch so as not to disturb my husband, a legendarily light sleeper. I think I may just set up camp out here until the allergy season passes.)
Allergies, boats, flip flops snapping up and down the school stairs: it can only be spring.
A year ago I had a major paper due, which preoccupied me. Right now I have a major paper due, which it's virtually impossible to force myself to think about. I guess that's progress.
A year ago my classes ate up all my attention. Right now I have trouble staying tuned in for a full hour in Privacy without my attention wandering; my class notes are peppered with "zoned out during this discussion" and "missed ~15 mins on this." And yet, while these chunks of lost time are all minutes and hours of my life that I'll never get back, no less so was last year.
A year ago the allergy drugs worked. Right now my husband is telling me to go see an allergist. I'm betting that moving to a different climate will do the trick. At least I'm hoping it will.
I've started a trend. The last time Judge Long Distance's seminar met, I was working on a cite check and afflicted with a weird illness. Now, in the past week, Judge Long Distance's seminar has met, I've undertaken my second cite check (still going!), and I'm sick once again.
I came down with something bothersome in Virginia, I think, or at least on the road trip home. On Monday I was running a bit of a fever and feeling throat-scratchy. Thankfully, Tylenol took care of most of that right away. The illness abated to a periodic cough and a bit of congestion, and I thought even that was getting better...until yesterday afternoon, when things took a dive.
Apparently I'm allergic to the third-floor lawbrary carrels.
No matter how many Ricola candies I sucked on, how much tea I drank, or how many times I refilled my water bottle at the projectile-spraying fountain, any stretch longer than five minutes spent at the carrel would lead to a tight bitter dryness in my throat. Thirty seconds later I'd erupt in a volley of lung-wrenching, migraine-inducing coughing. Maybe the baseboard heater beneath the carrel was spewing particularly irritating dust, or maybe the piles of books I'd been pulling from the stacks were giving off their own waft. Either way, I felt terrible: five or six other people are also citechecking this week, and I'm sure that constant hysterical coughing from two or three carrels down was doing nothing to help them concentrate. (The migraine hardly helped my own cite check, either. Today I remember to pack the ibuprofen.)
What is the best cough suppressant on the market? I've already taken an antihistamine (and whoa, is citechecking ever going to be double-plus-fun on an antihistamine trip!), but I need to bring out the big guns before they kick me out of the lawbrary.
Piet says:
Sors salutis et virtutis mihi nunc contraria,
est affectus et defectus semper in angaria.
Hac in hora sine mora corde pulsum tangite;
quod per sortem sternit fortem, mecum omnes plangite!
But he exaggerates. Plenty of people would have me believe that (a) this life objectively sucks, or (b) the fact that I'm out of synch with reality means that therefore my life ought to suck. And yet my life is so good. So good. Entire years in my elapsed life to date have not been this rich, this full of juice. I've seen euphoria, I've seen despair, and this is more even and solid and real than either. This is just me, happy, here, now. Even though there's so much I still don't understand, and may never. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with law school, this late at night, after this many glasses of wine, after this many quarters of cranking. My garden is still in crazy flower, even in the rain.
Today was my busy day: three and a half hours of class, an hour in the clinic, an hour at the citecheck (the walk of shame has been deferred until tomorrow) and a few hours at the traditional Wednesday-evening debate, where I still partook of many glasses of wine even though I no longer tend bar there. Busy days used to suck. Now they don't. The citecheck will subsume my next few days, and that's fine. I'm going to need to start my last Substantial Paper sometime soon, and that's fine. We're going to have to start packing up the apartment for our move in a few weeks, and that's fine. It's all good. Literally. I would not have things any other way.
Once, in graduate school, I had the transcendent fortune to interview Henry Jenkins for a paper I was writing on the hacker movement. At one point he dashed into his kitchen to show me an advertisement on his box of Raisin Bran: the company was plugging a line of children's accessories called Hip Hop Gear, which they promoted as "statements of social consciousness." Jenkins had no truck with a product that equated social consciousness with coolness or popularity in junior high, and now, six years later, I understand where he was coming from. I don't think social consciousness is about operating precisely on the wavelength of the other random people you know. Rather, I think it's about perceiving where they are relative to you. A realistic assessment of the distance between you trivializes neither their position nor yours. And once you've measured the phase shift, you can accommodate it, rather than ignoring it or attempting to force yourself into another space just because it's been suggested that that's where normal people belong.
There's an irony when I'm criticized for not fitting into an appropriate category and simultaneously lambasted for trying too hard to fit into someone else's categories, particularly when I don't feel the slightest bit categorized myself. Today the sky was full of lavender-blue clouds, always threatening to rain but never quite releasing their pent-up energy. I have no classes for the next four days. I have a cite check, and I'll do it, and it'll get done. And the rest of everything hovers contentedly around me, reminding me that I'm never as alone as I feel. My concerns, whatever their nature, are only as preoccupying as I make them.
Commenter cmc asks: "What puzzles me is why you think you will be free from constant preoccupation AFTER law school. Are you not planning to practice law?"
I am, but I doubt I'll be a litigator. Nor do I dream of making partner at a big firm. Hopefully, without these two ingredients, the practice of law will be a lot less emotionally sticky. I do plan on starting out at a firm, so I know I'll be billing lots of hours, but just because something is a time sink doesn't mean it haunts me during my off hours. Things can take ages without representing cause for alarm. (Cite checks, for example.)
My ultimate law-career goal, I think, is probably either an inhouse counsel gig or work in some government capacity. Teaching part-time could also be great fun. And I would like to write a book or two. There's so much to be done with a law degree; paying my dues at a firm is a fine plan for the first few years out of school, but there's the rest of life to think about, too. The better I can position myself now, the more choices I'll have later on. And since I do still enjoy law school -- even though, I'll confess, there's a lot of masochism in that statement -- I don't really mind the effort it still requires.
Seven weeks from now, when this ends, I'm certain that I'm going to miss it.
Ahh, the relief of finally handing in a paper that's been hanging over my head for a month. Even if it is only five pages long. Those were five pages dear bought, and it's extra sweet to finish them just in time.
Next up on the schedule: lunch with Sherry and Jeremy, who are in town for a conference, before I skip town myself. I'm probably looking forward to the fourteen-hour drive to the UVA softball tournament as much as anyone; bad back be damned (and it's doing better anyway), I'm a roadtrippin' kind of gal. And what better way to spend a four-day weekend right after the completion of a long-pending, annoying paper than by carpooling halfway across the country with a couple of girlfriends in a Hyundai? And then playing softball, or at least as much as my bad back will agree to, once we get there? Oh, and don't forget the booze. Or the Ohio Turnpike. Can't underestimate the joys of the Ohio Turnpike.
If your school is playing at UVA this weekend and you'll be there, be sure to say hi. I'll be the benchwarmer in the gray jersey and maroon hat, or one of them, anyways. And check back here on Monday for the full story of our exuberantly drunken team's spectacular streak of losses.
I've successfully procured a loaner casebook and plunked down $11 for the photocopied supplemental packet, so it looks like I'm taking Privacy this quarter. (What, you think I'd actually buy a casebook in my last quarter of law school? Hah! Not when I'm still savoring the release of having sold every last casebook I owned.) "I bought the copy shop packet," I shrilled at my husband. "There's no turning back now!"
This is probably for the best, eight-hour takehome exam when I can least afford it notwithstanding. I thought a bit more today about a schedule that would only require me to be at school from 4-6 pm two days a week, and realized that this wouldn't be a very good plan at all. At this point, inertia would quickly overwhelm me if I didn't have at least one Real Class with lecture and discussion and more than one night a week spent reading.
My Class Actions seminar has already won the 3L Dream Class prize, between its blessedly slim copy-shop packet of readings (back in the hell of Law & Technology, last fall, we'd slog through nearly this many pages in a week) and its requirement of only one ten-page paper. I'm thrilled, but honestly, another class like this and I'd lose my momentum entirely. I've been cranked to 11 for almost three years; I need to ramp down slowly, rather than just stepping off the treadmill altogether. (Oh, and quit mixing bad metaphors. But we knew that.)
Apparently I'm not alone in suffering from this 3L inertia, either. LawFairy neatly sums it up: "Getting work done is surprisingly challenging when there's barely any left to do." Yeah. Funny that.
Blame the mentality that leaves us all somewhere between boredom and strolling through a garden. Or maybe this is more like the peace of the marathoner who's just crossed into his last mile, if there is such a thing. I prefer to believe the latter, since right now I'm really looking forward to a second wind.
Have you ever sat down with a book on an unfamiliar subject, psyched to learn something new, with plenty of time on your hands and a real expectation that you'd be a wiser person once you'd mastered its contents? And then been completely disappointed, as much by the book itself as by your apparent inability to absorb its central truths?
This experience has convinced me that I am, in fact, getting more and more stupid with age.
Nothing in the book was, objectively, that hard to figure out. But every three or four paragraphs, I would lose focus and glaze over and zone. Attempts to summon the guilt fairy (to get me moving faster) or the self-loathing fairy (to harangue me about the real Smart Kids having none of these difficulties) proved vain. Much though I was intrigued by the book's premise, my brain-pan was having nothing to do with its analysis.
(I did, eventually, finish it. Perversely, the last few chapters seemed to make much more sense than the earlier ones. This meant I could polish off the second half of the book in about one-tenth of the time it took me to wade through the first half. Of course, the response paper remains to be written, but that's another issue entirely.)
This got me thinking about my relationship with books in general. I grew up a voracious reader, burning through fiction at a rate that frequently messed with my stepmother's errand-running schedule ("Didn't we just go to the library?"). Even so, learning stuff straight off the page has never been my strong suit. Written words apparently registered in a different place in my consciousness than spoken ones. I never read my textbooks in high school or even in college, instead deriving my actual understanding of the material almost exclusively from lecture and discussion.
I think I have a very mild form of ADD. Texts that fail to compel my attention quickly become an enormous, enormous effort for me to plow through. If a paragraph doesn't grab me, I'll reread it five times before it even partially sinks in. Much of my 1L misery was undoubtedly due to this: I'd have to force-feed myself cases three or four times before I figured out enough of their content to brief them. I'd sit there on the train, attempt to slog through the opacity of Civil Procedure, and end up feeling equal parts frustrated and profoundly stupid.
In college, I always sold my textbooks back to the bookstore since they were in mint condition and seemed pointless to keep. Now, ever since 1L, I've sold back my law casebooks almost as an act of revenge against them. I find them offensive on so many levels to begin with; this is just one more. Books in law school have become concrete symbols of all the answers I lack, all the intuition I'll never attain, everything I fight and fail to understand. They've gone from intellectual allies to virtual attackers. No wonder it feels vengeful to strike back at them, however I possibly can.
Even fiction has become difficult for me to handle since coming to law school. I'd like to chalk this up to a subconscious reaction to the bad experiences I've had with other books lately, or maybe to the annoying tendency of much modern popular fiction to involve unhappy characters or stressful plots. I just hope that it doesn't indicate a deeper acquired distaste for other people's stories, something which I've always enjoyed sharing. I want to love literary characters again. I hate going into a bookstore and being driven to frustrated tears because I lack the emotional bandwidth to sympathize with anyone in any of these books.
I may never regain my patience for nonfiction again; so be it, but once law school is over, I resolve to rediscover fiction. (Not of the Terry Pratchett/Harry Potter/Douglas Adams/Tolkien brain-candy sort; that I'll always read, and always enjoy, even in the throes of law school. I mean real, Virginia Woolf-style fiction.)
But I do reserve the right to maintain my disgust for sob stories.
With a day and a half left in my spring break, the pace is finally picking up a bit. (Even though, perversely, it's still snowing out.) I need to finish that law and economics book I've been staring at. It'd be nice if I finished that character and fitness application for the California bar this weekend. I'd like to make it down to school at some point today, to put yesterday's clinic filing to bed and sell my last Gilberts at the student-to-student co-op. I've also got some course selection decisions to make before classes start on Monday.
First, I'm wondering whether to bother with the Public Choice minicourse at all. On one hand, I know nothing about it and would like to learn something. On the other hand, it only meets six times. It'd be trivial to audit without having to take on the burden of writing another paper. And I'd have to miss one of those six sessions either way, since I have a clinic-related court date on the morning of April 5. I thought I'd need the credit to meet my residency minimum, but through some registrar's-office voodoo, Judge Long Distance's yearlong seminar counts for not one but two credits this term.
"The question," counseled my husband, "is whether you need the grade."
He's talking about graduation honors. (God bless my husband; even this close to the end of the game, he's still the best coach I could ask for.) And the answer is that I don't know.
So far, only one of my winter grades has posted. I'm completely satisfied with how I did in Negotiation, but I'm pretty sure that business school classes don't reach my law school GPA. Until I learn my other winter grades, and possibly even then, I won't have enough data to influence my course-selection decisions. (And that's assuming that knowing my numbers would somehow influence my decisions in the first place. I'm not sure it would.)
The second big decision is the one that so ruined my afternoon yesterday: figuring out how to book one more three-credit class this quarter without Fedexing myself to hell come May. The spring exam schedule was released last night, so now my options are looking slightly more flexible.
Several lecture classes have exams on May 23. Fed Jur is one of them (make the voices in my head go away! make them go away!), but so are Commercial Transactions, which is also a Massachusetts bar subject, and Legislation, which is taught by my excellent Admin Law professor. Most interestingly, there's also a takehome exam that day in a class called Privacy. This turns out to be a popular and highly-recommended class, apparently relevant to a bunch of areas that interest me, and taught by a professor who I suspect is actually younger than I am.
Legislation looks interesting, and I'm a huge fan of the professor despite my shrugworthy Admin Law grade, but it's a 1L elective so it'll probably be packed. I think the front runner might actually be Privacy, the class with the takehome exam. How upsetting is an eight-hour takehome anyway? I've avoided them to date because I didn't think I could take the fear for eight hours, but now that the fear is gone, I wonder if they're really that bad at all. Maybe a takehome at this point, unflogged by the angst that normally attends high-stress tests, could be a suitable anticlimax to my law school exam adventures.
I wonder what's sadder: having wasted my spring break on work and sleep rather than fun and adventure, having to make dumb decisions in my very last term of law school, or the fact that it's still snowing out.
This is not my day.
It's snowing out, for one. Next week it's supposed to crack seventy degrees, but today, the day I had to file my restitution order in court downtown, it's nasty and wet and blizzarding. (I took a taxi. Slipped on a puddle in the footwell as I was climbing in, too, which resulted in a good solid headbang on the doorframe and a nice little hey! thought you'd forgotten about me, eh? from my still-stiff back. Whee.)
Rumor now has it that the First Amendment and the Media seminar is grossly oversubscribed, with an enormous waitlist. Okay, I'm starting to think, maybe I just bite the bullet and do Conflicts of Law. It's taught by a professor I know and love, it would only stretch my schedule to three days of classes per week (with Mondays and Fridays off -- that's key), and one exam might be bearable if it's timed properly.
So I emailed the dean of students, requesting confirmation that I could take the exam on May 23d. And, since banging my head on the door of a taxicab during a spring snowstorm just wasn't enough fun for one day, it now appears that I've hit a wall.
My wonderful beloved law school -- the law school that has never yet screwed me over -- has an apparent policy in place that forbids the rescheduling of 3L exams to accommodate BarBri. "We will not be able to move exams to an earlier than scheduled date for BarBri conflicts," the dean of students emailed me back. "You may need to arrive in Boston a bit later; I'm sure BarBri will have make-up sessions available."
For Day One????
Suddenly -- and this may be the weather talking here, or my low blood sugar, or some other stupid thing -- I'm feeling well and truly screwed for spring quarter. As in, so SOL and powerless to fix it that now I want to break glass and rip cloth and scream and cry (hence my suspicion that low blood sugar is involved). The law school that saved my sanity now seems to have lost all regard for same. I'm screwed for seminars, I'm screwed for the one exam class that could work in my schedule...
...and to add insult to injury, Federal Jurisdiction is a bar subject in Massachusetts.
Why is it that every goddamned time I give myself an inch, I get punished for it? You'd think that for all the time I spend in full-throttle assbusting mode, some of that karma would keep. But the pattern in my life to date -- and for anyone who finds me too offensively Type A, this is why, dammit -- the pattern is that whenever I've relented even a little, I get hit with a disproportionate cost. It only makes sense that the first time I ever step off the treadmill in law school, my best-laid plans should crumble.
Now my inner child is digging in her heels and throwing a tantrum: I don't WANT to take Fed Jur. I WON'T do it. I WON'T. You can't MAKE me. I'll do independent research or find a way to get three clinic credits first. So THERE.
Yup, definitely in the blood-sugar crisis zone right now. Time for some chocolate. Of course, the disproportionate-punishment principle means that I'll probably gain at least five pounds.
I didn't get in to the Complex Appellate Litigation seminar. Normally this would just mean that I'd show up to the first class and hope to be admitted off the waitlist, but strangely, it doesn't look like I made the waitlist this time either. (I'm not sure how that's possible, since usually everyone who applies for a seminar but doesn't lottery in is automatically waitlisted. Strange.)
This means that I'm going to need a Plan B.
I sort of have one already: there's always the First Amendment and the Media seminar, where I am in fact waitlisted. But I did just take a con law class on the First Amendment; it'd be nice to try something new instead. I'm not waitlisted for any other seminars (perhaps it was stupid, in retrospect, to waste a preference on Complex Appellate Litigation?), though, so my other options involve...exams.
Sadly, there are more good reasons to avoid the exam classes than to take them. Any one would ruin my perfect two-days-a-week schedule (damn me for bragging about it and jinxing myself!), as well as painfully complicate my life come late May. Fed Jur is doubly bad schedulingwise, as it meets on Fridays. Antitrust is a morning class and probably involves more economics than I care to bother with at this point. That basically leaves Conflicts of Law, which may or may not be more worthwhile than just sticking with the First Amendment seminar. And if the exam happens on or after May 24, I won't even be here to take it.
Never let me brag about how perfect my plans are again.
Since they took me off the waitlist in October, my clinic has been less of a time sink than the rumors told me to expect. My defendants' mothers periodically call to see if we've gotten any new court dates; the defendants themselves write letters every so often, asking for copies of cases they can't find in the prison library; and the episodic Booker filings have been ever so episodic.
I guess it was just dumb luck that the avalanche didn't happen until I had time to deal with it, during spring break. In the past week and a half, back problems notwithstanding, I've booked nearly as many clinic hours as I managed to log all quarter long. (I found that wadding up my fleece muffler and shoving it into the small of my back helped a lot during long stretches of time in the office chair. So, for that matter, does the exercise everyone recommended, although so far I've just been doing cardio stuff and slowly working my way back up to real stretches.)
The good news is that my restitution order (incredible procedural gyrations, which can't really be discussed in public, notwithstanding) looks more or less ready to go, neatly in time for Friday's deadline. If I can stick myself to finishing this mind-bendingly opaque law and economics tome in the next few days, and come up with five pages of commentary on it by Monday night, then my spring break will have been officially productive. Even though I still haven't had a chance to get cozy with my seminar paper. Ah well. Hopefully a schedule with classes only two days a week (TWO DAYS a WEEK! I'm not even kidding! Envy me!) should leave me enough time to knock out 35 pages-or-so in time for the May 16 drop-deadline.
Meanwhile, the clinic demands show no sign of relenting. I've finally been given a real honest-to-pete court date for a status hearing on one of my remands (which will make the defendant's mom quite happy). "April 5?" murmured Judge Local as he checked his calendar. "You'll have to argue that one on your own. I'm going to be in California."
"Guess what," I grinned to my husband. "I'll be arguing this time. The judge is going to be out of town. I'm not just going to be a decorative accessory, like the chick on Law & Order who just sits there and watches Sam Waterston talk. I get to be the real lawyer."
That much, at least, is exciting. I've worked for a judge, and done moot court before plenty of pretend ones, but have never actually stood up during a real live motion call and asked a judge do to me a favor. This may not be the federal appellate advocacy that my clinic colleagues practice, but it's lawyering enough for me.
And, of course, it beats digging in and writing a major paper.
Halfway through spring break, I have neither reached the end of my book nor written the response paper to it, neither finished my clinic filing nor made any forward progress on my spring seminar paper. I have, however, slept a lot.
The beauty of spring break is that I can get away with this.
The problem with spring break is that I'm right on the cusp of not having enough time to get away with this. If I were moving through this stuff at a healthy pace, I'd finish it all fairly quickly and have plenty of loafing time left. But I'm not. I've gone to the gym twice in the past five days. I've been gloriously, deliriously lazy; I've relished every second of time spent curled up on the couch; and now I'm running low on time to finish everything that Needs Done before spring quarter starts, a week from tomorrow.
Spring break is an evil siren, alternately happy to tempt -- Aren't you sleepy? Just shut your eyes a little! There's plenty of time to get everything done, none of it's worth thinking about right now anyway, better just to rest and recharge...
-- and to taunt. Today's the twentieth and your restitution motion is due in court on the twenty-fifth! That's five days from now! And your response paper's due three days later! The end of break is going to sneak right up on you and then you'll have no time left because you'll have wasted the whole thing!
Most sane, normal, non-me people are better at yielding to the temptation and ignoring the taunting than I am. But I'm improving with practice. I'm already halfway through break and have yet to start really stressing about any of the stuff that seriously Needs Done. I've been chiseling away at this goofy law and economics book, plan to polish off the restitution motion tomorrow, and am certainly hoping to get to the substantial paper this week; but the powering sense of urgency that fueled my productivity in breaks past has largely evaporated. Things will be fine, I hear, and am uncertain if that's the tempting voice of spring break or my own voice, reassuring myself that I can nap a bit more.
Things will be fine. They'll be better if I can get more done sooner rather than later, but the clock doesn't seem to be ticking too loud and hard just yet.
The seminar lottery results were finally released today: so far, so good. The clinic, Judge Long Distance's seminar, and the Public Choice minicourse were already fixed on my schedule, and now I've got a confirmed seat in Class Action Theory to boot. Just one more class to go and then my law school schedule is complete, once and for all.
That one last class is my potential doozy, though. No word has yet come down on Complex Appellate Litigation, which is apparently being peopled by the instructor based on our statements of interest. If I make it in to the class, I'm betting that it's going to be a significant amount of work. S'aright s'aright; at least one class on my schedule should be, just so I don't spend the entire quarter gazing aimlessly out my living room window at the waterfront. (Look, there it is. The waterfront. Right there. Pre-tty.)
If I don't make it in, I've got two options. The slacker option -- which, given my recent embrace of slackerdom, is my first choice -- is to squat in First Amendment and the Media. I didn't lottery in to the class, but am on the waitlist, and have already taken two other classes with the instructor. On both occasions, he was happy to admit anyone off the waitlist who showed up to Class 1. He might feel somewhat stalked -- here's JCA in a third class he's teaching -- but to that I say he's only got himself to blame for continually teaching things that interest me.
The nonslacker option involves abandoning my perfect-May schedule and signing up for an exam class. After much reflection, I've realized that I will in fact regret graduating without having taken Federal Jurisdiction or Antitrust. How much I'll regret the omission is a separate question; I do think, all things being equal, that I'd opt for the nonsuicidal schedule over a painfully insane last week of May. But the option isn't entirely off the table, at least not yet.
As soon as I hear good news about Complex Appellate Litigation, though, it will be.
After a busy day packed with meetings, my husband emerged from the office yesterday at about seven o'clock to find me still in my pajamas.
"You sloth," he teased me.
He's right. There's the spike of freedom that comes from offloading a major burden, and then there's the cozy lazy slump that follows a long drawn-out jog home. Much though I'd like to be pumped full of adrenaline and inspired by my lack of classes right now, instead I find myself quite comfortably glazed over. My unfinished seminar paper, which should be occupying all of my free time this break, has thus far failed to occupy any of it. I haven't even been to the gym in three days.
That actually may be its own problem. After my last Negotiation class ended on Saturday afternoon, my husband and I took a long walk across town in search of an interesting place to grab dinner. (We failed in this quest, and wound up having some unimpressive fish at the Rainforest Cafe.) The real problem emerged after we'd walked all the way home: somehow, apparently, I had thrown out my back.
So I've spent the past few days curled up on the couch with a heating pad jammed into the small of my back. It has hurt successively less and less, which is good, but I can't figure out why it would have hurt at all in the first place, which is bad. I don't have back problems. I'm mystified by where this could have come from.
"We did walk quite a ways," I theorized to my husband, "and I was wearing bad shoes." But this wasn't entirely true. I was wearing my crap-weather boots, which are plenty comfortable (though ugly as sin; but I'm never the most stylish dresser, and during exam week all bets are off anyway).
"I think it's stress," my husband declared.
"But I haven't been stressed," I protested. "Or," I added, "at least I haven't felt stressed."
"That's not good," he replied.
Damn it. I can't even properly cure myself of being stressed. Even accomplishing all my major goals and diminishing my exam anxiety to near-nil has yet to succeed in fully calming my nerves. Apparently the best I can do is just sublimate my stress into invisibility, store it away somewhere while I'm studying, and then pay the price once the pressure has abated and the negative energy all comes rushing back to collect at the base of my spine in one huge knot.
"No, it's not," I frowned. "If this is how I'm dealing with stress now, then I'm going to get sick." Which is the last thing I need. I've seen stress-related illnesses, and they are not the kind of things you aspire to. I've already got a history of anxiety attacks, and I'd prefer that any similar maladies stay firmly in my past.
So I'm currently pursuing the path of zen by loafing. Soon I'll make it back to the gym, or for that matter, out shopping. Meanwhile, the days that I shower and get dressed are the special ones.
I did shower and get dressed to go to court this morning, even though it turned out that my motion wasn't being called (I guess the judge found my prose convincing -- or boring -- enough that no further discussion was necessary). I returned home, changed out of my suit, and proceeded to nap for the entire afternoon. And it wasn't even wintry out. Yay for recharging one's batteries. Yay for letting latent invisible stress drain out the old-fashioned way, through time and stillness. And sloth.
Nope, still unreal.
I mean, it's over. Legal Profession is done. I've taken my last law school exam (although I'm starting to wonder if the spring-quarter seminar lottery will ever happen; I may have to eat my words if I get screwed for seminars). My last Negotiation class, which had the chutzpah to meet two hours after the exam ended, is now also over. Which means the quarter's over. Which means I'm supposedly on break. And yet I still haven't managed to internalize any of this.
I have, however, gained one iota (notice how no one ever gains an iota of something? Well, I did!) of perspective on exams, or at least on how far I've come since the days of Torts and Crim Law. I'd been working since last night on an issue-spotter checklist, organized by lecture topic. It was a shambles when I went to bed, a shambles when I woke up, and only somewhat less of a shambles after I got to school this morning and settled in to work on it. What I didn't realize, in all of the shambling, was that I'd neglected to hit the little "save" button in Microsoft Word...ever since about nine o'clock last night.
(Guess where this is going.)
I was geared, poised, ready to take the exam. Piet had just finished playing my standard pre-exam inspiration, the Mascagni Hymn to the Sun. The proctor had just begun to read the instructions. I squeezed an earplug into my right ear, reached over with my left hand to grab my water bottle...
...and bumped the power switch on my laptop.
"Shutting down!" the Windows dialog box gleefully informed me, while offering me no option to change its mind.
I boggled for a moment, tasting something remarkably like a fresh spike of panic. Then reason reclaimed its territory, chanting calmly to the fear fairy: Shhh. It's OK. There'll be time to start the machine back up before the proctor finishes handing out all the exams. And besides, everything's saved.
This was almost true. Fortunately, everything else had been saved. Unfortunately, my checklist -- the checklist I'd just spent a half hour thinking about -- had been lost to the ethers.
Fortunately, I'd just spent a half hour thinking about it. While there was no time to reconstruct it, the exam already having started and all, at least most of the issues I'd need to spot were relatively fresh in my mind. And as it turned out, the rules grid -- on which I'd spent a good hour this morning, and which fortunately I *had* remembered to save -- wound up being my best supporting document for Control-F purposes.
And before I even had time to go pee, the exam was over. (Usually I can hold it for a two-hour exam, but a cup of coffee and a steel-lined travel mug of green tea didn't help.) Over. Done. Emailed off and almost as quickly forgotten. No more intellectual reflux, at least not yet. I appear to have washed my hands of that exam -- of law exams -- altogether.
To punctuate the conclusion officially, I queued up my old 1L post-exam song and found myself grinning uncontrollably. All that was left to do before heading home and jogging over to Negotiation was to indulge in the one reward I'd been promising myself all week: getting rid of the last of the law books on my shelf.
The bookstore turned up its nose at my Admin Law casebook, but the cashier counseled me to try again in a few days, since the class was being taught in the spring and "we keep getting new book orders every day." The bookstore also declined to repurchase one of the non-casebooks that I've read so far for Judge Long Distance's seminar, but the rest went for a few dollars; this was fine by me. (Both the holdover and the Admin Law book are now destined for resale in the student-to-student co-op run by our environmental club, where my Crim Pro casebook and all my old Gilberts have already retired. Someone will probably pick them up some day.)
But my Legal Profession books brought a fairly tidy sum. And my venerable battered old Con Law casebook, three quarters and 1700 pages of teeth-grinding and nail-biting and general discontentment caused by the state of the Supreme Law of the Land, brought in the most money of all. Sum total: $78.25, in line with my expectations this time. I spent $2.50 of that on an overpriced tin of Altoids gum, pocketed the rest, and hollered along with Piet all the way home: "Weight, keeping me down! Done, done, onto the next one!"
But there is no next one, unless you count the seminar paper that I now have two weeks to write. Barring any unforeseen difficulties with this coming quarter's seminar lottery, I've just finished law exams.
And if I keep repeating that, soon it may actually sound true.
Ahhh, sunrise.
Hopefully my deft command of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct will soon materialize with similar flourish. By the time the exam begins at nine this morning, they'll all be up on their barrels growling contentedly at me like cowed lions. And I, the lion tamer, will crack my whip for show and throw them bones.
Right now, though, there's the matter of coffee to attend to. And fixing my rules grid. And finishing my checklist. And driving to school. In fact, I think I'll do that now.
From nine to eleven, please do your thing. All the waves you can spare for my last graded timed GPA-affecting exam will be appreciated as ever. Maybe then I'll finally realize that this is it.
After twelve straight hours of wrestling with the hundred-plus pages of content contributed to the group effort by my Magnificent Seven, I now have a forty-page-long Legal Profession outline. It feels shockingly incomplete, mostly because I've never been able to shake the sense that there's a grand unified theory of professional ethics somewhere that I'm just missing. The casebook is utterly unhelpful; it consists of hypotheticals followed by endless strings of note cases from random jurisdictions and citations to state bar association opinions. My case grid is also forty pages long, almost wholly obviating its utility through sheer bulk; damned if I can remenber more than a dozen case names, and those are buried under a heap of slag. (Sadly, most of the cases I can recall -- Zauderer and Bates and Ohralik and Went For It -- only made it into my brain-pan in the first place when I was studying for First Amendment yesterday.)
This is as unprepared as I've ever felt for an exam -- and as little as I've ever worried about same. I think I'll take my rules supplement to bed now, have a dram of Potus Ypocras and some Sleepytime Extra tea, and get up before the sun tomorrow. Hopefully my mental batteries will have recharged a bit by then, such that the mention of things like "Model Rule 1.7(a)(2)" will prompt some better reaction from me than "Huh? Which one is that?" Should worse come to worst, at least the exam is only two hours long, only worth two credits, and it's my last.
It has not yet fully dawned on me that I have one, one, ONE exam left in law school. After Legal Profession ends at eleven tomorrow, it'll be papers only from here on out. What a total anticlimax, that my last-ever nonbar exam should be dull and dismal and ABA-mandated Legal Profession. Then again, maybe that's a fitting conclusion to a process I never did learn to love. I'll be almost as thrilled to be done with Legal Profession as I will to be through with law exams in general.
I never did grok exams, not even after seven consecutive turns at the controls. I figured out how to mechanize the process, which generally meant that my grades didn't dip below a certain floor (*knock wood*), but I never did figure out how to summon on demand the inspired intuition that makes the difference between a serviceable yeoman exam and a real sparkler.
Then again, I've also never thrown caution to the wind quite as I'm doing this time. Maybe abandon has its own magic. We shall see.
A year ago, I ruminated in this space on all the Con Law it looked like I'd be stuck taking in order to placate the guilt fairy.
Today, about ten minutes after I emailed off my First Amendment exam (over the wire, without any apparent glitches), it occurred to me that I was finally done with all of it. I've studied the Supreme Law of the Land for three quarters -- four if you count Crim Pro -- and have finally reached the end. Finally. Gone are any remaining hangups I might have had about somehow being a lesser lawyer since I'd failed to acquaint myself with the philosophical infrastructure (which, actually, feels more like an exoskeleton) of the law I'll be practicing.
No worries. I've got it covered. Equal Protection (a.k.a. Con Law III: Revenge of the Fourteenth Amendment), check. Government Structure (a.k.a. Con Law I: A Faint Hope), check. And now First Amendment (a.k.a. Con Law IV: Speech and Religion Strike Back, ossia Con Law IV: The Final Frontier): check.
Thanks, as ever, to my trusty senders-of-waves. I drank 'em in like water. This was either an unusually long exam, or else it was unusually difficult for me to stay focused, or both. Lots of brow-furrowing pauses between sentences meant that I was still typing ten seconds before the final "time's up" call. This is the first time I've handed in an exam without going back and rereading what I wrote. I hope it doesn't suck.
Ambient music: Ravel, Pavane pour une infante défunte.
One more exam to go. Two more days. I have just enough chocolate and green tea left in the pantry to get me there.
Things I have achieved in the past twelve hours:
- A completed outline for First Amendment.
- A completed case grid.
- A decent night's rest.
- A workout.
- A shower.
Things I have yet to achieve, but really should, within the next three hours:
- Gain a sweeping, translucent fluency in First Amendment doctrine.
- Or, alternatively, assemble a comprehensive exam flow/checklist which will give my answers the appearance of same.
It's snowing out, at least, which feels like a nice omen. Winter is reminding me where I am and why I'm here. I'll head down to school now, good and early and in no hurry, and finish up my studying there. I'm equipped with highlighter, Kleenex, red knickers, lucky charms, Dulce de Leche Luna bar, water bottle, and both wifi and wireline network cards (it still feels strange to be taking a floppy-free exam...maybe I should bring along a few just in case?). All I need now is waves: waves of focus, of satori, of oneness with the First Amendment. From 2-5 this afternoon, please send all you can spare.
In less than fifteen hours, I'll be sitting down to my First Amendment exam.
Good thing I just finished my outline. The case grid is maybe two-thirds done. The checklist is in abysmal shape. The flowcharts are nonexistent and unlikely to become otherwise in time for tomorrow afternoon, unless an army of brownies invades my living room after I've gone to sleep, puts my disassembled desktop computer back together, and works some brownie magic in Visio. (I never did get around to installing Visio on ye olde blacke boxe. A shame; it's too late now. Unless the brownies could do that too.)
Time was, I would have been a great deal more stressed about all of this. Which, in turn, would have made me more focused and alert and conscientious and into the subject, a necessary precondition for effective studying. Instead, right now I'm just grumpy.
I'm so tired of fussy note cases. I'm so tired of smarmy casebooks in general. I am sick of the general vagaries of constitutional law, fed up with outlining, and exasperated by the continuing persistent existence of law school exams. I've had it up to *here* with the fact that I'm expected to sit down tomorrow and mechanically go through the motions of issue-spotting and policy-balancing, again, the same old trained-seal shtick that I've been doing for years now. Watch me slap my flippers together and yark about the O'Brien test while balancing a spinning ball on my nose! Yay for law exams, which clearly bring out the best in all of us!
At least my Potus Ypocras is finally ready to drink. It, at least, was worth the wait. Then again, I imagine being altogether done with exams will be too.
When I first sat down to an exam at this law school, in the fall of my 2L year, I was bowled over by how much the school trusted us. People could listen to music while taking an exam, drink coffee, and even eat anything they liked, provided it wasn't "noisy or smelly." There was no strict exam-writing software that locked down your laptop and forced you to compose on its terms rather than your own. Instead, you used whatever word processor you liked best -- and were permitted to keep open, alongside your exam file, as many outlines and searchable text files as you pleased. There was little reason to highlight or thumb-index your outline, assuming you'd bothered printing it at all. Control-F was all you needed. Well, control-F and a functioning floppy drive. (Although if you lacked this, the school would accept both answers burned onto a CD and answers printed from the print lab immediately following the exam.)
I loved this. I loved that the school respected our honesty enough to take it more or less for granted. We weren't totally without restrictions: no Internet connectivity was permitted during the exam, of course, and there was a general rule against cutting and pasting pre-composed text into your exam file. But it would be difficult indeed to be offended by this.
When I preregistered for a schedule next quarter that guaranteed me no final exams, I had one particular little pang of regret. Now I'd never have the pleasure of checking the little "Graduating This Quarter" box on the standard envelope in which we submit our exam floppies. I quickly got over this, of course; the logistic and pragmatic costs of taking exam classes next quarter far outweighed the putative benefit of checking some silly box. I still liked the idea, though; it would have been nice.
Now, however, comes news from the registrar's office that they've decided to abolish the practice of accepting exams on floppies anyway. I guess it was time, as laptop floppy drives are fast becoming an endangered species. But their new policy strikes me as almost too trusting:
We are no longer asking you to save to and submit your exam answers on discs. All completed examinations will be e-mailed to a special address.I have a bad feeling about this. Either people will enable wifi during the exam, which feels shady to me, or there will be a mad crush immediately after the exam when everyone simultaneously enables their wifi and there aren't enough IP addresses to go around. Moreover, our school's webmail client is still not known for its reliability, even after a recent upgrade was supposed to have remedied a lot of system snags. I have no idea if it preserves the time stamps of documents attached to emails, and even if it did, I'm not sure I'd trust it either as the source or the destination of an email containing the one meaningful copy of an exam I just finished writing.Your registrar's office and the Law School's IT department have teamed up to develop a system that enables us to do away with saving to floppies. Therefore, please come to your in-class exams prepared to e-mail your exam to [email1]. Your take-home exams will be e-mailed to [email2]. E-mail will be the only exam answer delivery system accepted.
Our I.T. department recommends that all in-class exams be done on your laptop's desktop. At the end of the exam, when time is called to stop, you will have one minute to save, close, attach, and e-mail your exam. Once you have sent your e-mail, do not go back and open your exam. Quarantine it from yourself so that if there are any issues with receipt of your exam you will have preserved a time stamp of the last modification to the document, which will be the time the proctor called stop.
I think I'll stick with Gmail, just to be safe as possible on my end. And on the positive side, it looks like I'd have missed out on the joy of graduation box-checking even if I had opted in to an exam class next quarter. Good thing I didn't.
I'm still basking in the wonders of yesterday, if a bit jittery and sleep deprived from the Moto food hangover (excessively rich or sweet food has this effect on my otherwise butterfat- and sugar-starved body). But as ever, there's crap to be done: my Negotiation final project to draft, my First Amendment outline to consider, and the big thorny mess of Legal Profession to navigate.
My share of the Negotiation thing -- a team-authored paper on a major negotiation, with a few pages coming from me -- appears to be done as of this morning, which is nice. Less nice is the fact that, by this evening, I've promised my Legal Profession study group an outline section on the sixth topic we covered in the class. I still am uncertain what that topic actually is. Something about organizational clients, I think. Now would be a good time to read it. Looks like the rule book will be coming to the gym with me today -- the first time a Legal Profession book has ever graced my favorite elliptical trainer.
Thank goodness for the study group; let no one say that collective studying isn't alive and well among 3Ls. Seven of us have parceled out ownership of the seven topics we allegedly covered in the class, which by this evening should result in an efficiently-produced outline of sorts. It's the first time I've ever group-outlined. I guess I've previously been too anal to trust my understanding of a subject matter to someone else without first taking a crack at it myself. But Legal Profession will be the last law school exam I ever take, and it's proving damn near impossible to motivate myself to care about it. A group outline will do nicely, thank you.
Now to fend off the Legal Professoin blahs for long enough to do my part...
I've never once regretted my decision to take the Negotiation class at the business school. Even though it's on Saturdays. Even though some of the problem sets kicked my ass. Even though my MBA colleagues are still somewhat creeped out by the fact that I'm a law student. Even though no matter how well I do -- and I've invested enough effort in the class that I should probably do decently well -- it won't help my law school GPA one bit. Notwithstanding all this, the class has been perhaps the most fun of any I've taken in law school.
Every week we roleplay a different negotiation game. Our roles are assigned the week before, and the topics have ranged from tort case settlement negotiations to labor disputes to the terms of sales contracts. We're not graded on our outcomes, but we are scored every time on a large spreadsheet projected onto the overhead. Everyone knows how everyone else did. This doesn't make it less fun, but it does keep it intense. And it makes it smart a bit on the occasions when you know you got screwed.
I usually don't get screwed. I'm not a super-aggressive negotiator, but I tend to get decent deals just by giving the other guy as much as I'd like to get back. The nasty rumors you've heard about human nature don't tend to be as true as you'd fear. People generally appreciate respect and are happy to reciprocate. I'm a big fan of Pareto optimality, too, and prefer a deal where both parties are happy to one where I screw the other guy. This tends to result in situations where things work out well for both of us.
Last week, though, I got screwed. Part of this was due to the structure of the negotiation: I was serving as an agent for two stakeholders, both of whom forgot to tell me some key information without which I wasn't able to get them anywhere near the best deal. Another part, though, was due to our adversary, who blithely stonewalled us and refused to clue us in to any of his deal priorities. Still annoyed by how frustrating this was, I came in to today's class resolving to nail this negotiation to the wall.
It was a six-way negotiation, our last game of the quarter. A developer wanted to do a certain deal, but needed buy-in from four out of five stakeholders: the unions, the governor, the environmentalists, the competitors, and the bank (me). Based in large part on my utter inability to do math in my head, I decided that I couldn't sign on to any deal where the bank committed more than a billion dollars in funding. (As it turns out, I could have done two billion and made up the score by aligning differently with one or two other parties. But addition and subtraction have never been my strong suits.)
I didn't realize what a hard line I was taking, which I think helped. I'm one of those people whom adversaries can very easily read, and if I'm bluffing, it tends to be fairly obvious. On the other hand, if I truly believe that this is the best deal I can offer, that too will be plain to see. And in this case, it worked: I got my billion-dollar deal, snared all the points that went with it, and even -- thanks in large part to the competitors goofing and accepting a buyout below their reserve -- got the bonus points which would have otherwise required my aligning myself against the unions and the governor.
"How did you get them to settle for only a billion?" the professor grinned at me as she entered our results into the master spreadsheet. "Nobody gets that. Well, only eight percent. Most everyone else has to give two." Indeed, most of the class scores hovered in the sixties and seventies, with a few in the eighties. But for the first time all quarter, I'd smoked the entire class. I scored a ninety.
My father, himself an attorney and by all accounts a crack negotiator in his day, has been deceased for nearly five years. Every so often, though, a fragment of him will resurface and alight within my field of perception like a sparrow. Today, as I returned to my seat in the glossy classroom in the glossy downtown business school building, I heard an echo of his voice as he uttered his favorite expression of incredulity. "Holy smokes!" And then, in the same voice, his trademark throaty "Wow!"
I wished I could call him and tell him: how I was taking a negotiation class, how he'd get such a kick out of it, how I'd been doing such good deals just by following his philosophy of screwing no one, and how this time I'd done a better deal than even the craziest of the MBA wheeler-dealers. There were so many things I wished I could tell him, I realized as I crossed the river on my walk home. I wished he knew that I walked to my negotiation class, on Saturdays, across a river. I wished he knew where we lived, where I wound up going to law school, how I got here, how I've been doing, how I made law review and am so happy here, so happy, even though moot court didn't work out. I wish he could come to graduation. So much of this experience is dedicated to him. I wish he could know.
Or maybe the reason why I can still sometimes hear his voice, saying exactly the right thing at the right time, is that he does.
I couldn't believe the number of people who had come to watch the trivia contest finals. I guess we've all seen Jeopardy or Who Wants To Be a Millionaire at some point or other, but I didn't figure that watching people race to answer silly questions would be that much of a spectator sport.
But there they were. And more surprisingly yet, a vast majority of them -- people from the musical, people from the debating Society, random friends -- were there to root for us.
We didn't disappoint them.
We kept apace with the other team (three guys, one of whom was the clear star) for most of the first round; they pulled ahead of us bit by bit, though, and when time was called they were up eight to nothing. Winning the tournament required the best two out of three matches, so failing to take the first one meant only that we were all the more pumped. "Go for broke this time," R. murmured. "Just buzz in on everything." And by the end of the second round, we were up by 4 points. We'd forced a round 3. The room applauded.
We were neck and neck for three-quarters of Round 3. Then they'd pull ahead by a point or two. Then we would. Let no one say, I thought to myself as I drained my water bottle in between questions, that this wasn't a fair fight. Whoever winds up winning by whatever little wisp of a margin, this was a damn good game.
In the end, it was the other team who wound up atop the sine wave. Within thirty seconds of a buzzing spree by their star player, the timer sounded; the game was over, and this time they, not we, were up by three. But it had been a damn good game, and not a single person in the room was let down. "You guys were awesome," I told the winning team as we shook hands. "And you guys are a much better team than we are!" one of the non-star guys replied. He was right; they had a star, but we had real collaboration. It was the best way I could think of to lose.
So yeah, no trophy. But there wouldn't have been one even had we been the ones to wind up ahead at the final bell, and as far as thrills go, this one was a keeper.
Unfortunately, it was so much of a keeper that the adrenaline charge lasted for most of the rest of the afternoon. By the time I calmed down, my last two Real Law School Lecture Classes With Exams And Stuff had gone and ended without my noticing. No more First Amendment (so now it's finally time to outline). No more Legal Profession (so now it's finally time to, oh, start doing the reading). Suddenly another quarter is over, and I have two exams at the end of next week, and they'll be the last ones I ever take for a grade.
I had the first inklings of this sentiment last quarter, but now it's become a truism in full flower: Exams have lost their power to terrorize me. The exams I currently face are particularly unfrightening; neither First Amendment nor Legal Profession was taught (or attended) especially aggressively, and neither professor appears inclined to grill us unreasonably or grade too harshly. And frankly, after the sustained intensity of so many papers, it's just hard to muster any amount of nerves. Law exams have ceased to be Law Exams; now they're just exams, like you'd take at the end of any college class. Law school is nothing more than just school.
It's nice not to be afraid any more; it's nice that the real intense crazy work is starting to abate. But maybe it's a good thing that the intensity of law school didn't simmer down sooner. After all, the one thing it's never yet been is boring.
Today I registered for my last academic term in law school. In honor of never being able to do this again, I went with my gut and broke with a few of my long-standing personal practices:
1. Taking everyone's advice. A strong consensus of readers recommended that I take Federal Jurisdiction. I love and respect all of your input, but sorry guys, it ain't happening. Arguably I've broken this rule before, all the times I insisted on taking bar classes when everyone told me not to. (To your credit, I've regretted some of those.) This is the first time I'll find myself not taking a class that y'all recommended, though. I almost feel badly about it. You guys are like my Greek chorus. I'll miss you when this blog goes dark.
2. Punishing myself with my schedule. For once I am not going to cram my life full of law school until it splits at the seams like an overstuffed beanbag. I will be taking two regular seminars, a minicourse, the clinic, and Judge Long Distance's seminar, which meets two more times. And that's all. Sure, there's plenty more stuff I'd probably enjoy learning. But that'd be true no matter what I took. Meanwhile, I'll only be living in this amazing brilliant city for three more months, and there's a lot of exploring I still need to do. It's time.
3. Punishing myself substantively. A handle-less commenter noted what a notorious glutton for punishment I have been from Day 1 of law school. Em is right: why, at this point, should I continue beating myself up with the toughest classes and the strictest professors and the hardest yada yada? To whom do I have anything left to prove? For once in my life, why not just take a goddamned break? Fed Jur might well have been a truly rewarding experience, but I'll bet that a nice tall glass of chill-out will be every bit as good for my mental health.
4. Following law school norms. I'll be doing two (2!) cite checks this quarter: one in April, one in May. By any conventional reckoning, that's just weird for a 3L. (Not to mention fairly low on most people's aspirational to-do lists for their last term in law school.) But, for reasons I'll go into some other time, I don't mind them. And this going to be is my norm-flouting quarter anyway. No morning classes. No classes at all on any day except Tuesday or Wednesday (the minicourse is an exception to both of these prohibitions, but it's only two weeks long). Most importantly, no exams. One of my chosen seminars requires only a ten-page paper; the other will involve a bit more work, but will be the only class this quarter that does. And everything seriously substantive should end by May 16, which solves all sorts of logistical problems. My relief is palpable.
The guilt fairy hasn't completely shut up yet, but I've been plying her with luscious visions of a relaxed and cosmopolitan spring in a wonderful town as a reward for all the labor and angst and agida we've engaged in thus far. So many people have alluded to law school experiences that consisted of something other than all-crunch, all-the-time. I'd like to see how that feels. And I doubt I'll be particularly disappointed.
As of this afternoon, our team has officially made it to the final round of my law school's trivia contest.
In two days, we will face off against the school's second-biggest threat (having already defeated the reigning champion last week). The team that wins the best two out of three matches will advance to the all-star match, played against an all-faculty team at admitted students' weekend.
A cynic might look at this and laugh. Hah. What a typically law-schoolish way to run a trivia contest. No real prizes or anything. You work and work and work and all you win is the chance to work some more. And even in the event that you ultimately win, the grand prize is just the fact that you didn't lose.
I'm no longer such a cynic, though. Maybe I've just gotten accustomed to the law school treadmill effect, but I think I've finally come to appreciate the entertainment value of intramural contests. Prizes, after all, are little more than clutter. (And trivia is hardly work. Work is what I should be doing these days. But I digress.) The law school trivia contest is far more satisfying an endeavor than my routine squirrelling of Lexis loyalty points (currently up to 17,535), even though the latter will eventually result in some nice All-Clad saucepans while the former only improves my mood. Saucepans are nice, but we're going to have to pack them when we move. The thrill of victory, meanwhile, is its own infinitely portable reward.
The counterargument, I guess, is that infinitely portable rewards have a much shorter half-life than something like an All-Clad saucepan. A few years from now, the thrill of victory in something like a law school intramural trivia contest will have faded, while something more tangible or functional might still be taking up space on my shelves. Well, okay. But so what? Must everything endure for the ages, even assuming it can? If I had to pick, I'm fairly certain I'd prefer evanescence to obsolescence. At least a flash in the pan gets to flash.
Exactly 100 days remain until graduation. This too, at some point, shall pass. It's sad to imagine how the whole law school experience might dry out and shrivel and crumble in my memory, with only a few tangible aftereffects -- a framed diploma (which, if past behavior is any indication, will probably remain in its box in my storage closet), a resume line item, a few half-remembered case names -- remaining to indicate how fancy the flower arrangement once was.
Then again, it might not. One glance at my college scrapbook or an old sent-mail file from 1995 and I'm right back there, studying Dravidian verb paradigms and practicing for my senior recital and wondering what the hell I intended to do for a living. Law school was like this, too vivid to fade so quickly. Law school, I'll wager, will keep.
I woke up at 10 am this morning. Yeah, I mentally mumbled to myself as I shuffled into the kitchen, this is nice. Let's make a deal right now: no morning classes ever again.
So I've arrived at a slate of courses, more or less, for my final term in law school. I need nine credits to maintain residency until I graduate, two of which are already spoken for in Judge Long Distance's seminar and the clinic. (Law review, regrettably, earns no one any credit at my law school. They're serious about us doing it for the love, I guess.) So that leaves me with seven credits to fill. Regular classes and seminars are each worth three.
Fortunately there's a one-credit minicourse being offered in public choice theory, a subject about which I know nothing. Unfortunately it's first thing in the morning, just like my accounting minicourse last fall. But at least it's only two weeks long. That's workable. And after those weeks elapse, I'll be left with with only two classes. Neither of which, I've promised myself, will take place before lunchtime.
The Complex Appellate Litigation seminar shares a time slot with Conflicts of Law, but at this point I prefer the seminar. My one remaining major choice is between Federal Jurisdiction -- toughest curve in my school, commonly acknowledged as the hardest class taught in law school anywhere, intimidating old-school Socratic professor -- and another seminar. (Antitrust is the dark horse here, but it's at 11 am, which means I couldn't sleep in until 10. Thumbs down to that.)
If I signed up for First Amendment and the Media or Legal History of Early China, I'd have no classes any day except Tuesday -- and no exams at all. Given the crazyass relocation weirdness that will probably consume my life in May, this could be a wise choice. And the thought of Federal Jurisdiction, through the haze of a drowsy snowy Monday morning, is awfully ponderous.
How important is it to study Federal Jurisdiction while still in law school? Would not doing so really make a difference if I wanted to work in a federal court some day? How valuable is the class, really?
Three exams in one week, last year, right before spring break = bad.
Two exams within two weeks, this year, with spring break right afterward = not so bad.
Two impending exams, right before spring break of one's 3L year = tough to care about, at this point.
I'm tired of being sick. The antibiotics come with a strict schedule; even though I finally found time to get the prescription filled this afternoon, I can't pop the first pill until "before breakfast" tomorrow morning (which, I guess, means I'll have to eat breakfast). This is annoying: I want drugs now. I went to a party tonight and could barely taste the food, let alone appreciate the buzz from the sangria. Swallowing and breathing freely are strictly part-time luxuries, and now NyQuil doesn't even knock me out past 2:30 AM anymore. You know it's a bad sign when you're developing a tolerance to NyQuil.
And these goddamned spammers, randomly firing trackbacks into my archives just to boost the Google ranking of their goddamned poker sites. I suppose it beats some of the raunchier spam that's been left in my comments, but the hours I spend deleting it all are hours that I'll never get back. Nobody's even going to see these trackbacks except Google and me, which makes it even more of a waste. I'd give up altogether if only it weren't so annoying to be taken advantage of. *sigh*.
Thankfully, a truly neat thing happened today that eclipsed the rest of the day's minor annoyances. This is the second year I've competed in the law school trivia contest; my team last year was promptly and handily eliminated in the first round. This year's team, however, has held together better: we won our first two elimination rounds, and were scheduled to play two more during lunch today.
"You think you guys'll win the contest?" my husband (and eternal Trivial Pursuit runner-up) asked me last week.
"Nah," I told him. "There's this one guy who's been undefeated since 1L. We'll keep winning until we face this guy's team, but then that'll probably be it."
We faced off against his team in our second match today...and won.
There's one more elimination round before the finals, so there's still a solid chance that we won't take the grand prize. Just being semifinalists is pretty exciting, though. And to have unseated the long-reigning school champion: that is something indeed. That is nontrivial.
How to get sick: participate in the law school musical. Share as many things as possible -- dressing rooms, makeup, pizza, cookies, Scotch -- with your castmates.
How to get sicker: pay no attention the burgeoning ache in your bones and burning in your throat. Instead, stay up until 2 am the night after the musical bows, grinding out your last Advanced Trademarks paper.
How to get sicker still: fail to sleep in the next morning, then take a nice brisk walk across the river in the wretched chilly clammy weather to a Negotiation project meeting. Extra points if you're underdressed for the weather.
How to get even sicker yet: just think about the four very long hours of class that currently obstruct your view of a restful evening of fluffy blankets and chamomile tea.
The musical bowed last night, we struck the set within an hour, and that was it. My last law school musical. Never again will I stuff a pillowcase full of styrofoam peanuts under my oversized T-shirt and become a walking pregnancy joke. (Now my super-secret part in this year's musical can be told: following last year's typecasting trend, this time I played a pregnant 2L. The joke transcends any individual pregnant 2L; I've lost count of how many of these my school currently has.) No more jockeying for makeup mirror space in a closet-sized dressing room full of semi-clad women. No more lurking in the wings, watching other people's scenes while utterly and shamelessly avoiding work. It's over.
I spent most of the evening on the verge of tears, unwilling to admit this. By rights I should have gotten completely plastered at the cast party. But I had to drive home, the hangover from M.'s punch is a memory I'd just as soon forfeit, and anyway, there were better things to do. Like join in a shouting chorus of "Sweet Home Alabama" led by the two 1Ls who were actually from there. Or commission the aid of a semi-professional dancer to teach me some basic Argentine tango. Or just avoid thinking about how soon it was all going to end.
My husband skipped the cast party to pack his suitcase. He flies out to California, like clockwork, today. The weather agrees with me that this sucks: the bright sharpness is gone from the air, which has faded to dishwater-gray in the face of a dull rain. I'm about to spend a week alone, no musical, no husband, just the chinchillas and a cite check and whatever the heck else still has to get done. Loneliness on a rainy day is a dull gray thought itself, but right now some focused seclusion is necessary, I suppose. There is work to be done. There is always more work to be done.
This presumes an ability to focus, though: something I have not shown much of, lately.
The Pareto efficiency graphs are beautiful. You can tell you've reached a Pareto efficient solution, my husband explains to me, when there are no other solutions to the northeast of it on the grid. He draws a line due east, then another due north, and from that one perfect point he's describing infinite time and space in which nothing could possibly work better for all involved parties than this situation, right here. I think I want to frame this and keep it on my nightstand. My goals in life are humble: Pareto optimal is good enough for me.
Cockiness goeth before a fall: I'm going to need to do the optional fifth paper in Advanced Trademarks after all, to replace this past week's grade. The instructors complained that I appeared "less committed than usual to a specific solution or normative framework." I wanted so badly to be done with papers; I guess it showed. Damn. Damn. So there's still one more to go, then. (And you'd better make this one count, whistles the guilt fairy. Um, thanks.)
This would be disappointing in any event, but tastes particularly bitter on a night when I had to dash home immediately after the curtain went down on the law school musical. No time to drop by C.'s birthday party; no time even to seek out my friends who had been howling with laughter in the audience. An unfinished problem set on Pareto efficiency, due at the beginning of tomorrow's negotiation class, impatiently awaited me on my kitchen table.
There has got to be a Pareto efficient way to manage my workload.
The law school musical opens tonight. Costumes and stage makeup are all lined up. I wear makeup so seldom in real life that pinking my cheekbones and ringing my eyes with brown crayon actually makes me feel glamourous.
Our band is incredible. They jam during scene changes to mask the noise of set pieces being dragged on and off stage. I asked them to play Hendrix and they obliged with two of my favorites, Foxy Lady and Manic Depression. I now have a talent-crush on the band.
Actually, I have a talent-crush on more than a few of the cast, too. While this is a show utterly without pretense, there are still some fairly fantastic singers and dancers on that stage. I suppose I should envy them -- particularly since I can't dance to save my skin -- but instead I just beam and try to restrain myself from hugging them.
Last night my Con Law book sat on the prop table all night, open to ACLU v. Reno, the same page at which it's been bookmarked for what must be weeks now. Yes, I am *that* far behind in First Amendment. But I'm also a 3L, in my last law school musical, and right now that's not worth wasting on ACLU v. Reno. The 1Ls in the cast spend their backstage time furiously highlighting Crim Law handouts. I want to say to them: this too shall pass.
Back home, I started the laundry, continued to boycott my reading, spent some Together Time hanging out with my husband, and downed the better part of a bottle of Spanish champagne. Apparently this was all it took: somehow it happened that there I was, in my building's laundry room at 11:45 pm on a Thursday, folding fresh warm clothes and belting out the Rachmaninoff set from my senior recital as well as I could remember it.
Ohhh, did it ever feel good to sing at the top of my lungs again. Not the joyous, exuberant shouting of the law school musical, but actual classical singing in my trained range where things like pitch and breath and intonation matter. This was joy of a different flavor, joy long neglected. I've lived in apartments ever since college, none of which has ever had a private space where I could practice at full voice without offending a neighbor. And whenever I'm stressed, I go off breath anyway, sometimes to the point where I can hardly breathe at all. I carry a lot of tension in my throat; lack of practice makes it easy to forget how well singing releases so much of that tension. Plus, if you've had enough Spanish champagne, you don't even notice if you sound like crap.
Just as I made it *almost* all the way up to the high C-sharp in the Vocalise, head thrown back, eyes closed, I heard a door open.
It was Jerome, the night maintenance man with the cornrows and the goatee, heading for the utility closet in the laundry room.
"Uh, sorry," he said, smiling bashfully.
"Oh, no, I'm sorry," I said with a big goofy grin.
But neither of us actually was.
There's always a comedown after a big crunch, sure, obviously. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it, that after you've strung yourself out and deprived yourself of sleep in pursuit of a Flaming Near Term Target you'd be a little drained.
But this post-stress laziness thing isn't serving me very well right now. I haven't been to the gym in three days. Probably won't make it today either, despite the fact that I'm sitting here now in my gym clothes (nice try, JCA). The law school musical opens tomorrow, my winter-term cite check starts on Monday, and now would be an awfully good time to catch up on the week-and-a-half's worth of reading by which I lag in First Amendment. Not to mention the month-or-so's worth of reading that I have been neglecting in Legal Profession for, oh, a month or so.
Instead I feel like a great big puddle.
I blame too much pizza.
It's dark out, dark in this room, dark all around, and I'm dizzy and vaguely nauseous under the influence of something that feels an awful lot like jet lag. But, thank all the Powers that Be for late-night caffeine (a second wind in a cup! or rather, a third!), I've just sent off what is hopefully my last 1500-word paper of this quarter. I may still need to take the mulligan in Advanced Trademarks, but right now I feel a lot like done.
Last quarter, I did nine papers. This quarter I've only done six (not counting the Beast, of course, which probably skews the accounting a bit). Next quarter I've already committed to at least two, for the balance of Judge Long Distance's seminar; but now I wonder if it's worthwhile to sign up for very many more.
On one hand, spring term exams are going to pose a horrendous scheduling problem this year. Like last year, they're going to start immediately after classes end (as in, the next day). Unlike last year, though, I will need to show up for my first BarBri classes in Boston within a few hours of the end of my school's exam period. I drive fast, but not that fast.
On the other hand, I'm not sure I'll be better off spreading out nine credits' worth of work[1] over eight weeks than I'd be lumping it all at the end of the term. We're going to need to find the time to house hunt, to pack, to plan our fourth move across time zones in two years. And I'll still have the clinic, two more cite checks, and the Substantial Paper from last spring's seminar to finish, too.
The contenders on the exam-class side of the fence are Federal Jurisdiction (to which I've all but committed), Conflicts of Laws, and Antitrust. Potential paper classes, on the other hand, include Complex Appellate Litigation, Advanced Contracts, and possibly a seminar in Franchise Law in case I ever do decide to pursue the idle dream of opening my own Starbucks. There's always the option to knock off two of the nine required hours in the Financial Accounting intensive over spring break. And then there are the less likely, yet still charming, random seminars: Roman Law, Legal History of Early China, Criminal Justice and Cyberlaw.
Disbelief hits me twice as hard when I'm suffering from jet lag: holy crap, these are the last law school classes I'll ever choose. This is it. I'm almost done for real.
[1] Irony: I need five credits to graduate, but there's a law school minimum of nine to "maintain residency." As though I've ever felt like a resident in the first place.
After four days of almost uninterrupted cranking, here's where things currently stand.
Federal court thingamajig: final draft approved for filing tomorrow, via voicemail from Judge Local. (I don't think I'll ever get over the utter coolth of Judge Local calling my cell phone. There's his number, right there. There's his voice on my voicemail. I will never delete it.)
Advanced Trademarks paper: finished and emailed off. That's got to be some sort of record, at least for me.
Judge Long Distance seminar paper: unfinished. Unstarted even. Have yet to finish the book, in fact; roughly 150 pages remain between me and the back cover. I'd hoped to get this whole thing done today so I could spend a nice Valentine's Day evening with my husband tomorrow, but eh, this wouldn't be the first romantic holiday ruined by law school. At least there's a good chance it'll be the last. And I'm sticking to our dinner plans, no matter what.
When you are this tired, everything glows. The Pergolesi Stabat Mater suffuses the air in my living room with fine bronze. My laptop has a muted silver aura which pulses slightly as I type. The furniture is backlit in soft focus, the books strewn across my couch give off a pale page-gold haze, and even the chinchillas seem to be emitting light from some unknown source. My eyes, sore and protesting after too much Microsoft Word, will register nothing any more except light.
Never gloat about how little work you have left. It's an invitation for crushing commitments to spring fully-formed from your clinic inbox right when you have the least time for them.
In the next four days I must produce:
- My first ever honest-to-pete filing in federal court, the long-anticipated Booker memo. We all knew they'd want one eventually. Length: roughly 1000 words. Deadline: close of business Monday. (No joke. And no, says my interim supervisor, we cannot file for an extension. Damn. Damn.)
- My last (knock wood) weekly paper for Advanced Trademarks, which could theoretically be postponed if necessary, but shouldn't since I've already done so much work on this week's topic. Length: 1500 words minimum. Deadline: 6 am Monday.
- The final paper for this quarter in Judge Long Distance's yearlong seminar. Still need to finish the book, much less come up with an opinion on natural rights. Anyone have any interesting thoughts on natural rights? Length: 1250-1500 words. Deadline: 8 am Tuesday.
Ah well. So much for catching up on First Amendment. At least it stopped raining and is bright and freezing out again, which illogically lifts my mood. I love it when the weather has that *snap* that makes me pick up my feet when I walk, pick up my pace, go a little faster. Stuff gets done. And when the short term to-do list is this crowded, that's exactly what I need.
The weekly 1500-word thought paper for Advanced Trademarks has become a fixture of my Sunday schedule. As, apparently, has procrastinating on same.
I have two more of these to go this quarter (three if I screw one up and need to replace my lowest grade). It's such a relief to be taking a sane seminar again after last quarter's Law and Technology debacle, which wanted 1500 to 2000 words per week for the entire term. These guys want four good papers and that's it. They even give you an optional do-over. I heart them.
(I've always thought that "debacle" should be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable rather than the second. "De-BOCKle" sounds wrong to me. Shouldn't the stress pattern be the same as in the word "popsicle"?)
So if I get this paper done today, which should happen if I can successfully stick myself to it, then I'll have just one left. That's nice. One more week's worth of work and then Advanced Trademarks can go plonk on the to-do list. But next weekend is already booked, since I've got my last paper of this quarter due a week from Tuesday for Judge Long Distance's yearlong seminar. I did want to knock out all of my remaining wordcounting responsibilities before I have to go in for my first law review cite check, but I'd like to see myself try actually to write these papers on any day other than Sunday.
Still, it's reassuring to think that I've only got three more of these 1500-word annoyances before my quarterly paper quota is full. 3L year has been disproportionately about writing papers for me. It's quite nice to be rid of the pressure of exams, don't get me wrong, but all this wordcounting -- not to mention the blood-from-a-stone effort of repeatedly coming up with substantive things to say about the law, about which I seldom feel I have anything to add beyond what people much smarter than I have already said -- can really wear one down.
Three more papers, though. That's doable. If I can pump myself up enough at the thought, maybe I'll just go do one of them right now.
So yesterday turned out to be the big day. Today was just the day after.
Today's email brought a bunch of introductions and welcome messages, invitations to various law review yahoogroups, information on training and citechecks and office protocols, and numerous other tastes of the life I'll be living for the next four months. It's scary to stand in the shadow of this monumental labor and attempt to stare it down. But I asked for it, and as much as it's clearly about to devour my life, I'll be doing it for the love. (Much love goes out, as it must, to everyone who sent their support my way. Thank you.)
Two things have occurred to me in the past few days. First, while I was on tenterhooks waiting for the committee's decision, I couldn't get any reading done. Then, once I'd learned the decision, I was so excited that I couldn't get any reading done. Now, I'm going to have so much work to do (not two but three cite checks) that I'm not going to be able to get any reading done.
Second, I realized, I didn't really care. I'm not yet far enough behind in First Amendment to worry. I should probably be a bit more concerned with Legal Profession, but eh, it'll work out all right. Suddenly classes are way the heck down at the bottom of the to-do list. I'm still going through the motions of going to class, but this is about as disengaged as I've ever been in law school.
I've finally arrived. It's finally just school to me, as it always should have been, as it's been to other people all along.
It's funny, the sense that I'm still just a bit out of phase, even now. I've suddenly been graced with the workload of a 2L on law review, which feels just about right for a transfer student who treated last year as a 1L do-over. At the same time, I've just passed midterm in my seventh (!) academic term, my fifth at this school, and am starting to feel like a dyed-in-the-cloth 3L. I guess this is the kind of temporal identity crisis that is best resolved by graduating.
- Another course-selection option has popped up: my law school is now offering a five-day, two-credit Financial Accounting intensive during the second week of spring break. The fact that I find this tempting says something about me which I'm sure is unflattering.
- Word from my editor: the write-on committee will vote on all submitted Comments toward the middle of next week. I should hear by Thursday. All the waves you can send from Wednesday on would be appreciated. (To them, not me.)
- We spent the first half of today's Negotiation class detecting lies. Twelve people were either shown a photograph and asked to describe it to the class, or shown an abstract art painting and asked to describe some imaginary photograph instead. Two people in the class deduced the liars and truthtellers 100% correctly. I was one of them. This is the first test I have aced since 1996.
- I wound up buying a recording of Yo-Yo Ma playing Schumann cello music at Borders because my gift card was for $10, this CD cost $11 and I didn't feel like paying anything out of pocket that I could avoid. But I'm keeping all of your suggestions on file for my next wish-list update. (Amen to the Rhapsody subscription. I had a trial one once and loved it, but my husband insisted I get rid of it since he thinks I'm wasting our amazing stereo capacity when I listen to music on my awful laptop speakers.)
And for Hani:
- They're removing the seams and rivets on the Bean, so right now it's surrounded in scaffolding. When they're done, it'll be one big seamless chrome dome.
Somehow, in front of me on my laptop screen, a three-page outline and bibliography for my seminar paper has appeared. I'm happy to see it, but not quite sure how it got there. Maybe the chinchillas did it. I've been too unfocused this week to accomplish anything of substance; spending the past five weeks wholly immersed in my Comment more or less Kentucky-fried my brain.
A longtime reader made this request via email:
I'm a 2L working on my comment and am having a lot of trouble with it...just curious if you might be able to blog some advice on comment writing? I spend a lot of time staring at my computer screen and thinking..."UGH"
Yeah, there were a lot of "UGH" moments. But my advice on those is never to kick yourself when you're down. Commanding yourself to work harder is seldom productive. Instead, take a step back and do something else for five minutes while you think about what you're trying to articulate and how. My Snood-to-drafting ratio in the early days of my Comment was roughly 2:1. But don't let yourself stop thinking about it just because you're relaxing your focus. Always continue to let your mind wander around the topic, no matter what you're doing to distract and calm your attention span. The further you meander, the more ideas you'll find. This got me through a lot of the "UGH" effect, at least until I'd gotten the whole paper conceived.
The biggest problem with Comments -- and with Substantial Papers in general -- is how long they're required to be. There's no good way to steam straight through them; you need a higher-level plan of attack. I find that it helps me organize my thoughts on a paper if I brainstorm a list of related subtopics that I'd like to cover right at the beginning. Once I've figured out how these relate to each other and in what order, they become the outline for my paper. I then can parcel out my research and my thinking into discrete "chapters" around each subtopic, few of which wind up being longer than ten pages. When you cut up a huge paper into a series of bite-sized smaller papers, it's a lot less intimidating to confront.
The "UGH" moments return once the paper's been outlined, researched, and annotated to the extent that I know what I want to say in each chapter. Sometimes the words just don't want to come. Here's where brute force comes in. You're facing a deadline and need to get a draft out the door, so do it. Write and don't read what you're saying. Don't edit yourself as you compose. Throw away your filters and brain dump your thoughts indiscriminately, without worrying about how inarticulate they sound. You'll revise them later. If you've got unresolved questions, talk through them with someone who you can rely on for good advice, or note them in red text in your document and go back to them afterward. Just get everything out of your head onto that page as quickly as you can.
If you follow this approach, though, beware of the second-draft slump. The rougher your first draft, the more red ink it'll feature when your editor hands it back to you. At the sight of all of that paper-blood, it's very easy to lose faith in your product and start believing that the whole thing is crap. Remember: it isn't. It's just raw. You still need to keep dressing and basting and fussing over it until it's properly cooked. Once you get through that first round of edits, you'll feel a lot better. After the second round, you'll feel better yet. And so on.
The one aspect of the process on which I can't yet offer advice is the event of ultimate rejection, only because I haven't gotten there yet. But here's my coping strategy, for what it's worth. First, see what sort of academic credit you can get for the work you've already done. Even if it doesn't serve its purpose as a journal piece, maybe you can still get independent research credit or satisfy a graduation writing requirement. Second, don't shelve it; maybe a journal at some other school would be interested in publishing it. Ask around. And third, put that paper right into context. You're still on the journal even if you didn't get published. Or you're still at a good school even if you didn't manage a successful write-on. Once you've done your part, any process failure is beyond your control.
Treat yourself to a bottle of champagne, no matter what the outcome. And don't forget the KFC.
Word has come via email that registration is open for the two 2-credit minicourses that are about to begin. Environmental Law is taught by one of our school's most famous professors, whom I haven't yet had. And I'd wanted to take Remedies all along, but crossed it off my list back when it was still supposedly a 1-credit class. It has now been reinflated to 2.
"Oh no. Don't do it. Don't do it," was my husband's reaction when I floated the idea of registering for either one.
He's right, as usual. I overcommitted in the fall, which made everything less fun than any of it would have been in isolation. I'm already taking the same number of credit hours as I did last quarter. If law review pans out, I'll once again be hosed.
But my schedule right now is deceptively open. None of my classes meets before 1:30 pm, and only one (First Amendment) meets more than once a week. (And it only meets twice. Not bad.) The pressure of a daily-basis workload is entirely gone. Judge Local is on sabbatical this quarter, so my clinic guidance will need to come from one of the other staff members, but their hours are as flexible as mine. It looks, for all intents and purposes, as though I have time.
Except I don't, really. And what time I do have, I should be spending on things that already rank on the to-do list, like the seminar paper and the clinic and [*crosses fingers*] law review. It's just always hard to say no when the buffet table beckons.
A few weeks ago, the registrar's office announced that they would no longer be mail-dropping printouts of our transcripts as the previous quarter's grades came in. Instead, they informed us, we would now be accessing our grades exclusively from the kludgy ol' university website.
To their credit, they've finally made it less kludgy. Previously the website featured only roughly translated letter grades, unaugmented by even a plus or a minus, and wholly lacking in the intricately descriptive yet enigmatic quality of our numerical grading system. (Picture a law school transcript dancing the Dance of the Seven Veils.) But this time, they've enabled the website to show our actual number grades.
I like this, in theory. I've always favored paperless options over dead trees whenever possible. But the problem with grades being published piecemeal to a website is that there's no real notification when yours have posted. No longer can you rely on an envelope appearing in your mail folder when there's news to be had. The only way to find out whether a grade has posted on the website is to check it.
Weekly.
Daily.
There was a time when I was psychologically incapable of looking at a grades website. Then I transferred, forced myself to look, and ultimately overcame that particular phobia. It became a point of pride that I could read grades on a website without having a meltdown. Life was good.
But now it's gone too far. The only fall-term grade left to post to my transcript (aside from the two blanks in my yearlong courses and the "pass" that I'm assuming I earned in Accounting) is the one from the psychology minicourse, worth all of one credit. I already know, more or less, how I did last quarter. I have no reason to keep looking. Hell, I have no reason to care.
For that matter, I have no reason to care about any of these grades. (Given how unremarkable they turned out to be, that's probably a good thing.)
I've never understood the point of law school grades. Never. The only time mine have ever truly mattered was when I applied to transfer schools. All three paid jobs I've been offered since transferring -- two summer associate gigs and a clerkship -- were offered to me for exactly two reasons: personality fit and the fact that I was a student at this law school. My transcript, after a cursory check to avoid embarrassment, was all but an afterthought.
I suppose it's valuable to have grades, just for a sense of how you performed in comparison to other people who took that exam. But in classes without a curve, grades are unhelpful in that respect. And as objective freestanding measures of one's command of a subject, they suck. I spent ungodly hours last winter quarter, reading Tax, outlining Tax, going to daily Tax class, and otherwise eating, breathing, and sleeping Tax. My grade on that exam precisely equaled my grade in Criminal Procedure, a class I neglected as long as I could. And I'm far from alone in this type of experience.
My favorite summation of law school grades comes, ironically, from my torts professor, who called them "a little intramural contest." Here, at least, this is thankfully true. But I still have never learned to appreciate the toxic buildup of adrenaline that begins with an exam and ends with reloading a website, over and over again, in search of some hidden meaning. Because by now we all know damn well that there isn't any.
There's this incredible feeling, the morning after a major deadline has passed. Sort of like an anti-hangover. You wake up with a start, wide-eyed, in mild shock, dizzy from having offloaded such a longstanding burden so quickly. And then it sets in: the twin effects of ahh, freedom! and well, now what?
At long last -- at long last -- my law school to-do list is down to only one major item: the all-but-forgotten Substantial Paper required by the seminar I took last spring. It's due in May, and therefore offers little inspiration for me to burn any more midnight oil right now. Even the guilt fairy doesn't give a crap about it yet. It can wait.
Then there are the smaller, more local details. I should catch up on my reading for First Amendment and Legal Profession, maybe start thinking about the fact that they've got exams coming and we're nearing midterm. I need to meet with Judge Local and figure out what the heck has to happen in the clinic now that, as R. puts it, "Booker hit the Fanfan." I've got three, possibly four, 1500-word thought papers to write for Advanced Trademarks this quarter, plus another 1500-word response paper for Judge Long Distance's seminar next month. But that's it.
It's been so long since I haven't been hosed that I've forgotten how it feels.
I have a strange urge to make lasagna.
Last Saturday: nine degrees out, high winds.
Today: twenty degrees out, blinding snow.
Wisdom of choosing a winter-term class within "walking distance" of home, rather than on a campus at the other end of a cozy car ride: questionable.
Commenter Anonon writes, a propos of my continuing ability to be upset by law school when traditional law students in my shoes would have given up already:
You would think non-trads, having experienced the world, would have more perspective on things. But they don't. They are forever running scared. Maybe it's because they feel the pressure of competing against "traditional" students. Or perhaps it's because nontrads who go to law school are particularly neurotic. I just don't know.
Nor do I, but I can speculate. Not only am I a non-trad (in the sense that I didn't go to law school until six years after I graduated college), I'm a transfer student as well. Those are two distinct monkeys to have on one's back. The transfer-student monkey is easy to explain: you've shaved a year of law school off your transcript and/or abandoned all of the things you achieved as a 1L. Law school becomes, effectively, two years long. You never actually feel like a 3L; rather, it's more like you're doing 1L over again, and then 2L, and then *poof* you've graduated without ever reaching the point where nothing mattered.
The non-trad monkey is of a different breed. It does make sense in theory that, if you've held grown-up jobs and been responsible for making your own living before going to law school, you'd have "more perspective on things" (I assume Anonon means "a better sense of how little these things matter") since you've "experienced the world." But in reality, that hasn't been true for me; if anything, my forays into the wonderful world of gainful prelaw employment have shown me exactly how valuable a credential can be, how significantly one's career trajectory can be affected by objective measures of one's capability, and most importantly, how much damage can be done by a bad decision.
This is my "perspective on things": making the wrong choice, at any point in your career but especially when it's going on the record and will forever serve to classify you, can absolutely screw you. It may screw you actively, in the sense that you've now foreclosed opportunities previously well within your grasp. Or it may be more of a passive screw, hobbling your future with regrets and if-onlies. I think this perspective is a big reason why many older students do return to school -- to correct decisions we've already made, once we've learned how they've failed to serve us. And it's also a motivator to keep working, to prevent doors from closing, to make sure that we don't find ourselves screwed again.
Of course, maybe we are just particularly neurotic. I certainly can't say that law school has been very good for my mental health, that's for sure. But I've got five months left before I'll graduate and be done with school once and for all, and I see no reason to waste that time (or, let's be frank, that astronomical tuition). It's already gotten me to a very good place: a clerkship, a job, and an alumni network around the world that will stand me in good stead. Why not see if it can get even better?
My negotiation class meets on Saturday afternoons. It's a required course at the business school, so it's generally well-attended. Most of the people taking it are weekend MBA students. A few regular b-school students have been drifting in and out during the add/drop period, trying to decide whether they really want to take a Saturday class. But as far as law students go, there are precious few of us: one second-year JD/MBA student, and me.
I kind of like this: it's neat being almost-unique in the class. And weekend MBA students are a comfortably familiar personality type. I went to graduate school part-time myself, seven years ago, and my classmates' profile -- people who are gainfully employed, but wistful at their jobs and dreaming of something more exciting -- hasn't changed.
They do, however, have a layman's relationship with lawyers: a fearful respect that we can get anything we want, combined with a deep-seated mistrust that what we want is usually contrary to their own interests. Yesterday's in-class exercise was a settlement negotiation in a personal injury case, and when the professor posted this week's team pairings on the overhead, several people ribbed my partner: "You got the law student! You're screwed!"
I thought: me? a threat? Heh!
"You've got to realize," I told her as we went looking for an empty room to do the exercise, "they don't actually teach us very much at all about this in law school. You learn a little bit of personal injury law in torts class, but nothing about settlements or how to pick a dollar value or anything like that."
"Right, right," she said, clearly not believing me.
I was tempted to play the evil lawyer right then, to drive the hardest bargain I could (last week I'd been entirely too nice in my pairing, and I'd resolved to go more hardcore in the future). But instead, we decided to negotiate as the actual characters in the fact pattern rather than as their attorneys. This was much more fun: I was the plaintiff, a video-store employee with dreams of being a musician who had fallen through a sidewalk grating and now could no longer play guitar. We were disputing the pain and suffering damages owed me by the defendant, who both owned the property and had installed the grating. I gasped. I wailed. I pictured the Beast slavering and gnashing its footnotes, and had no trouble summoning tears to my eyes.
I got my partner, who had been unwilling to settle for anything above $50,000, all the way up to $215,000. (Granted, my own initial minimum had been $500,000, but I was happy to rethink it based on how little I knew about personal injury settlements. Had I played the bad-guy lawyer, though, I would have been able to work my intimidating law-school "this is how it is" angle. Next time, maybe.)
"So who found their negotiation influenced by emotion this time?" the professor asked after we'd all returned to class.
"She cried!" my partner exclaimed, pointing at me from across the room.
I couldn't help but grin. "I almost cried."
"I wasn't going to settle, but then I was like, please don't cry, please don't cry!"
"We weren't playing lawyers," I said in my defense. (As though I'd ever actually get all verklempt in a serious negotiation! ha!) "We were playing the actual parties. So I was like, I'm going to be stuck working at a video store for the rest of my life!" The MBA students laughed. I laughed with them. Had someone sprung that approach on me, I'd have reacted the same way. It was elating, to have done something right.
Now I can't wait to play the lawyer.
Suddenly this week has just spun into high gear.
- Good start notwithstanding, the Beast needs quite a bit of work. Immediately.
- Five page paper due Monday morning for Judge Long Distance's seminar, which meets once a month for the rest of the year.
- Five page paper due Sunday afternoon for advanced trademarks (which can be postponed if necessary, although I'd rather not).
- "Analytical exercise" due Saturday afternoon for negotiation. Length TBD, but thankfully the business school believes that brevity is the soul of wit.
- Readthrough for the law school musical tomorrow night.
- And now, after months of anticipation, the long-awaited SCOTUS opinions on the Federal Sentencing Guidelines have arrived. Turns out the current Guidelines are governed by Blakely after all. Which means that my still-pending clinic clients are probably about to be remanded for resentencing. And who knows what might happen after that?
Whee! School's back in session!
The Legal Profession is a lame duck of a class, a gauntlet we're all required to run in order to graduate even though most of us have already had done with the MPRE. Picture a weekly lecture from 4 to 6 pm, in our acoustically-awful auditorium, full of bored 3Ls saturating the room with bored-3L chi. It has great suckage potential.
Fortunately, the material has a life of its own. Or at least it appears to. Actual quotes from the casebook:
"Think about yourself and your law school colleagues. Are alcoholism and drug abuse serious problems among lawyers?"
"Matter of Diggs, 544 S.E.2d 628 (S.C. 2001), suspended a lawyer for 90 days for filing a form saying he had attended a CLE seminar when, in fact, he arrived near the end of the program. Does this case send an important message to lawyers? Do you suppose it means that lawyers might also have to pay attention to the speakers at CLE programs?"
And the winceworthy highlight of this week's reading:
"Attorney Grievance Commission v. Protokowicz, 619 A.2d 100 (Md. 1993), was even more bizarre. A divorce lawyer was convicted of helping his former client break into the home of the client's estranged wife. When a feline resident of the home came into the kitchen, the lawyer put it into the microwave oven. You can guess the rest. The court suspended the lawyer for not less than one year for both breaking into the house and cooking the cat."
One year???
Maybe this class does have entertainment potential after all.
Good news: I got in to the negotiation class at the business school. It's at their glossy downtown campus, four blocks from my home, on Saturday afternoons. Suddenly my Saturdays will be productive again. And the grade doesn't touch my law school GPA, so I'll be doing this purely on a lark. For the love, even.
Bad news: I won't be getting a refund for any of the $165 in course materials currently sitting on my kitchen table. In fact, there's still another book I'll need to buy. At least I'll be saving gasoline money by walking to class.
I am excited to crack the plastic wrap on that CD, though, just to see what's there.
In other news:
Westlaw Trivia is back. This semester's game runs from January 16 through May 31, 2005. Earn 5 points every time you correctly answer a trivia question. Answer any 15 questions correctly, and earn bonus points. Answering all 105 Trivia questions correctly will earn you a grand total of 6000 WestlawRewards Points! If you miss a question or two, don't worry Email Extra Credit will keep you on track for the ultimate bonus. Make sure you're receiving WestlawRewards emails, or else you'll miss these make-up opportunities.I heart Westlaw.
Yesterday at the lawbrary, I sat near a friend who was doing the first round of reading for Bankruptcy. I glanced at her book and thought you know, I'm glad I'm not taking that. What a relief. My reading for First Amendment, meanwhile, is fascinating.
The funny thing is, I'm fairly sure I would feel exactly the reverse about both classes had I chosen Bankruptcy instead of First Amendment.
The prodigal suitcase has finally returned home, none the worse for wear. It was already in fairly bad shape, though, down to the duct tape preventing one corner from falling apart. Who knew that our quick-fix would turn out to be an identifying feature when the bag went missing?
I've been unsuccessfully trying to game the purchase of course materials this quarter with the goal of spending less money on them than the bookstore would like. First Amendment is the easiest of these -- another strong reason to take the class -- since I kept my casebook from Equal Protection, and this class uses it as well. There's a new supplement, but it's practically identical to last year's, and the half dozen or so new pages can easily be copied or Lexis'd. Cost to me: $0. I like this.
I thought I had another winner with my Professional Responsibility casebook: WestlawRewards offered it for 4589 loyalty points, and ever since the end of the Westlaw trivia contest, I've got about twice that. All puffed up with pride at stiffing the bookstore another hundred bucks, I clicked all the way through to the end of the ordering process -- then noticed the fine print: Allow 3 to 4 weeks for delivery. Um. Not such a great deal in a nine-week-long quarter. Damn.
Fortunately I found the book for $50 on half.com. So there, bookstore.
But my victory was to be short-lived. The business school class I hope to take is unable to confirm my registration (or even the possibility of my registration) until next week, but everyone agreed that I should buy the books for it now and attend class even so. As a law student I lack access to the business school intranet, so the only way for me to find out the required reading was to head back over to the bookstore and shelf-spy for the professor's name. Ah well.
The workload didn't seem terribly offensive from a shelf-presence perspective: a small course packet and three short novel-like books. I chose two of them, figuring I'd not bother buying the third until after I'd been admitted to the class. The store bought back my Crim Pro supplement for a whopping $2 (which beats the $0 it will be worth as soon as the 2005 one comes out, so I took the deal), and all in all I expected my purchases to amount to less than $100.
"That'll be $164.58," the bookstore clerk told me.
"You're kidding!" I yelped despite myself.
"Nope." She wasn't.
The course packet, which couldn't be more than fifty pages, turned out to cost well over $100 alone. Apparently the thin booklet also includes a CD ROM, which based on its price must contain the trigger passwords for all the world's major nuclear powers, the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, and the recipe for turning lead into gold. Or maybe the business school is just *that much* better at ripping off its students than the law school.
At least my trademarks seminar has a good old-fashioned citation list as its syllabus. You can buy them all printed out from the copy shop if you like, but in my current mood I might just not.
Good vacations make for difficult returns to non-vacationing life. Even as we sat on planes yesterday, from Orlando to Atlanta, then from Atlanta back here, clouds mounding up around us like rubberneckers on a highway, I could feel the vacation mojo stretching out and attenuating. The distance between us and Florida grew and slackened and darkened. Only Friday night I was in Tampa, looking over my uncle's shoulder, cawing in disapproval as he (sacrilege!) added a dose of heavy cream to the bagna cauda. Only four days ago I was on horseback.
Now one of our suitcases has failed to arrive home along with us. Delta Airlines is coy as to its current whereabouts, most likely because they have as little idea as we do. Rumor had it at one point that the itinerant bag -- who could blame it for wanting to extend vacation a little longer? -- was spotted last night in Kansas City. Kansas City was nowhere on our itinerary. I envy the bag; it gets to go adventuring while I'm headed back to school today.
(A bag was delivered to our building this morning, but it isn't ours. It does have a Kansas City tracking tag on it, though. Maybe it and our bag decided to play a Parent Trap-style game with their respective people? Now Delta says our bag is due to arrive here after lunch, and wants this one back. We shall see.)
My winter-term schedule has shaken down into an oddly-shaped exercise in timing. On Mondays from four to six, I have my Advanced Trademarks seminar. On Wednesdays in the same time slot, I'm signed up for Legal Profession, our ABA-mandated ethics class. On Wednesdays and Thursdays shortly after lunch, I'll be in First Amendment, the *crosses all appendages* last Constitutional Law class I'll ever take. And on Saturdays from one to four, if they let me in to it, I'll be taking a negotiation class through the business school. It's long been a goal of mine to take classes outside the law school; that was much of the point of transferring to a school that was attached to a biggo university. Alas, the plan has failed to work out thus far. But maybe this will be my lucky term.
There's the clinic, too, which will rev noisily as soon as Booker and Fanfan are decided. (Easy there, Chief Justice, we wouldn't want you to overexert yourself.) And the write-on deadline is the twenty-fourth, three weeks from today. Much drafting and redrafting of my pupating Comment will need to happen between now and then. Fortunately I've got more or less all my mornings, and many of my afternoons, to do this. And fortunately my laptop was not in the bag that went joyriding in Kansas City.
A quick hour at school today, leaving voicemail and drafting client letters, and my clinic commitment for the quarter was officially complete. My write-on editor tells me that, due to travel schedules, I may hear neither yea nor nay on my revised long proposal until next Monday. So unless I truly go off the deep end and begin blitzing on my seminar paper in the next few days, which isn't currently the plan, I've got a week of something like downtime.
The Crazyhouse Quarter is over!
I treated myself to some fancy hair care product in celebration, then blithely headed home.
On the kitchen table sat a thin, menacing envelope labeled NATIONAL CONFERENCE OF BAR EXAMINERS.
"Hey," I called to my husband, "my MPRE score came."
Had I been a 1L, I might not have been able to open that envelope. But now, the closest thing to fear that I felt was a distaste for the exam and a low-pitched hope that I wouldn't be stuck taking it again in March. At a normal human pace, unaccelerated by any emotional pitch, I opened the envelope.
"YES!!!"
"Huh?" called hubby from the other room.
"Passing score in California is 79," I exulted, "and in Massachusetts it's 85. And I got a ninety-seven."
"Out of how many total?"
"Oh, whatever, 150 or something," I managed through what M. calls my "shit eating grin."
He laughed. "Marginally ethical, you!" he teased me. "Hardly!" I laughed back at him. "Flush with ethics am I!"
Of course, now I have to take the actual class. (I passed the MPRE without taking an ethics class! How jacked is that?) But that is beautifully trivial compared to a potential rerun of an evil standardized test. I'm done with standardized tests until the actual bar exam. I'm done with tests in general until March. And I'm done with classes until January. I'm done. Imagine.
YES!!!
Something happened to me, early this morning, that isn't supposed to happen any more.
I woke up in the dark, blinked in the glow from my alarm clock, and *snap* thought of an issue I'd missed on the Crim Pro exam.
Perhaps the only sure cure for this type of intellectual reflux is to pass the bar exam.
I think law students have a dampened sensitivity to pain.
We get so kicked-around, psychologically, by the school experience that we become calloused. We block out the perception of things that make us hurt. Eventually, the callouses grow so dense that even the most painful physical stimuli -- say, hypothetically, a bikini wax -- fail to produce the appropriate response from the law student's fried nerves. Instead, we leapfrog neatly over agony and go straight into shock. I should be limping right now. Instead, I feel like I'm about to faint.
I am DONE with Crim Pro. (I'd like to say I was done with this quarter, but I've still got a few hours to book in the clinic. Check back on Monday for much rejoicing.) Your waves were, as always, much appreciated and tangibly helpful.
There's something about finishing your last exam, for your least favorite class in law school, then coming out of the classroom and into the big hall of windows through which it is chilly and raining outside. It breaks over you like a burst balloon: That's it. I never have to do that again. (No, I am NOT taking Crim Pro II next quarter. If that screws me for the bar then I am well and happily screwed. But I doubt it will.)
"How are you?" the dean of students, who was standing near the recycling bin, asked me as I approached it armed with empty water bottles and old practice exams.
"I'm done!" I grinned at her, depositing the bottles in their proper receptacle.
"You have that done kind of look," she told me as I gleefully jammed my freshly-highlighted checklist and my old exams through the paper recycling slot. "I can't tell you how many people I've seen coming out of these classrooms with that look on their face, right as they throw their outlines into that bin."
My outlines never got printed at all this quarter, but I completely understood what she meant. It's the load off. The joy of the load off. If I hadn't eaten the rest of my homemade sauce over pasta for lunch -- an effort which involved ingesting a whole stomach-souring habanero pepper -- I'd be gorging myself on every last delight to be found in my quiet, empty apartment. (Hubby is in California this week on his regular business trip; we've made a pact to be in separate states during all three exam seasons this year.)
Instead I'm going to take the rest of the night off. Tomorrow may well see me in the library redrafting my write-on long proposal or doing some research for the clinic, but tonight I'm going to run a good hot bubble bath, break open the Korbel Brut that's been chilling in the fridge just for this occasion, and enjoy it with fresh blackberries and evergreen good reading.
I'm done with Crim Pro!
I've been up since seven-fifteen this morning, cramming and cramming and cramming all the Crim Pro that failed to get crammed yesterday when my attention span went on strike.
I don't think I've ever been more tired of a subject in my life.
Exam is in an hour and a half. Time to head down to school, print out my issue-spotting checklist (my outlines are exclusively electronic this quarter, but it's reassuring to have some piece of paper to highlight), and meditate on reasonable reliance and coerced consent and pretext and profiling and the exclusionary rule.
Please send any waves you can spare between now and dinnertime.
Suddenly everything else on earth is orders of magnitude more interesting than Crim Pro. I'm consumed by the desire to play with the chinchillas, play games, play music, read the CD liner notes, read the catalogs on the kitchen table, clean up the kitchen, check the contents of the refrigerator, check email, check the view from the living room window, watch traffic go by for awhile, organize all the pillows on the couch, and even just stare at the absolutely fascinating texture of the carpet.
I'd take a dinner break to refocus, except that I already did.
Once again, Professor Admin Law comes out smelling like a rose. Not only did he actually manage to explain admin law with about the closest thing possible to actual clarity (despite using the word "epistemic" more than once), he made a very, very good call on the exam length.
All law school exams should be only two hours long. In two hours, you don't need a bathroom break. By the end of two hours, you're only just starting to get intellectually winded. And after a two-hour exam, you've still got enough energy left to mosey on home and start studying for the exam you've got tomorrow. Speaking from experience, I can profess that the same is not true after a three-hour exam.
He left off the theory question, as I'd hoped he would. There's only a finite amount of actual thinking one can do during a two-hour exam. Fortunately, I lucked out on the how-are-these-pairs-of-cases-related-to-each-other question; didn't have to think very long at all before coming up with a few ways they might be. Whether or not those are correct is anyone's guess, but at least I got them, which was the whole point. (And I made sure to use the word "epistemic" at least once. Might as well get some mileage out of having had to look it up in the first place.)
And the best thing about a two-hour exam: it's over quickly. As in, already. Almost before I knew it, I was no longer taking Admin Law.
Before I lose my momentum altogether, I should resume cranking on Crim Pro. Ah, the joy of only having to think about Crim Pro for one more day!
Few things spike an otherwise-gray morning, the day before your Admin Law exam, like Professor Admin Law responding to an email question by explaining how your frame of reference is off by about 180 degrees. "All these cases seem to do Y," I asked, "but are there any cases that do X?" Response: "That whole line of cases is all about X!"
Aha! of course they are! I knew that.
I sure do hope this exam doesn't eviscerate me.
Ambient music: Rachmaninoff, Isle of the Dead. Damned if it isn't a musical metaphor for my 1L year.
[pause to appreciate my return among the living]
[/pause]
[resume complaining]
Admin Law exam in 33 hours. My energy supply is on the wane, as is my liquor cabinet. (Mood of JCA when she's run out of vodka <<<< mood of JCA when there's a nice full bottle of vodka in the freezer.)
Here's the best I can do, in celebration of finishing all two of my outlines, as it were, just in time:
Midnight Chocolate Milk--and yet it is neither chocolate, nor milk...
1 part Godiva Chocolate Liqueur
3 parts Vanilla Silk soy milk (yes, I do tend to keep several cartons on hand at all times)
Combine in your largest coffee mug. (Mine is enormous and features a picture of Minnie Mouse sunning herself at the beach.) Works best if you layer in the chocolate first, then add the milk. No stirring should be necessary. Raise the mug on high and toast your completed outlines, the distance you've come since 1L, and the satisfaction of music that matches your mood.
I love having no fear left. Exam season was just hell on wheels back in the days when it was suffused with so much toxic fear.
But the drawback to having no fear left is a major loss of motivation. I have exams in three days and um, yeah, there they are. Instead I natter on about Westlaw, dawdle at the gym, do a bit of housecleaning, ponder putting up the Christmas tree even though we'll be traveling on Christmas.
Why is it that every other case in Crim Pro seems to have a defendant named either Brown or Robinson?
I've been playing the Westlaw Trivia Contest assiduously since August. It's addictive: after fifteen correct answers, you win a loyalty-points bonus. Fifteen more correct answers, twice as many points. And so on, seven questions per week, up to the magic peak, question #105.
I got my 101st correct answer yesterday, and found myself actually looking forward to logging in today. I was so close to beating the game. Four more correct answers and I'd be done, as well as 2,000 loyalty points richer.
Little did I know that there were only 105 questions in the entire game. I'd casually gotten a few wrong over the course of the past few months, not suspecting that you'd need an actual perfect score to beat the game.
I log in today and see: Congratulations. You have completed all Trivia Game questions.
Um, no, I haven't. I can't have. I have four more to go before I hit the jackpot. You can't cut me off now. You bastards. You can't. All quarter I have religiously played your fussy little game, and now you have the nerve to deny me my endgame because I got four questions wrong over the past five months??
I'm going to email the Westlaw rep. This just isn't right.
I haven't been able to get myself worked into any kind of tizzy over the panic-inducing encroachments on our civil liberties that are allegedly coming any day now, if not already here. I can't identify with someone who objects to the "humiliation" of a search, as though having to feed your shoes through the airport X-ray and walk barefoot through the metal detector was anything personal. I've even been patted down, on occasions when I've improvidently traveled on a one-way ticket purchased the day before, and the worst effect of this was to delay me another few minutes from my mad dash to the flight gate.
I've even had possessions confiscated: the TSA folks and their handy X-ray once found a corkscrew that I'd forgotten in the bottom of my purse. It was a loyalty-program tchotchke from Il Fornaio, and now I'll never see it again. But to claim that my life or civil liberties were in any way adversely affected by this -- I own other corkscrews, and even if I didn't, they'd be trivial to procure -- would be histrionic to the extreme.
This very morning even, my husband, whose laptop has been malfunctioning lately, got pegged by the TSA on his way to California; they confiscated his computer screwdriver set and my sewing scissors, which hubby had borrowed. "Well shit," I groaned, "I guess if it's a matter of national security." Actually, it was more a matter of why did you try to take my sewing scissors on a plane??, but I let it go.
As I'm outlining Crim Pro, sifting through class discussion about profiling and unreasonable searches, I can't help but shrug. Why should their drugs be protected when my sewing scissors aren't?
My outlines are steadfastly refusing to write themselves.
This is the end of my sixth academic term in law school. Had I not transferred, I'd be graduating at the end of my sixth academic term. Instead, I've got two more to go, which is all well and good since I'm far from done with law school. But all the same, I'm currently suffering from something that feels a lot like senioritis.
Maybe it's just paper burnout. I wrote nine this quarter, ranging from five to eight pages apiece, the cumulative effect of which left me feeling as though there couldn't possibly be more work left to do in this term. I've still got the rest of the write-on and the spring seminar paper to produce, but those have both been on the to-do list for so long that they hardly count. I should be done. I feel done.
I'm not done.
I took Wednesday night off, to celebrate the end of the paper-intensive Law and Technology seminar. Then, since my husband had been hosed with work on Wednesday, I took last night off too so we could spend some time together. Today has been so marginally productive that it looks like I'm headed for a three-peat. (I did go to school for an admin law review session, though, which should count for something. Maybe it earned me another night off.)
Maybe I should take full advantage of having a whole week to study for two exams by procrastinating for half of it. That'll put the pressure back on. Right.
I hate law school casebooks. Hate them.
They are outsized, overpriced, egocentric oeuvres bound in faux leather far beyond their station, containing little information of any reference value whatsoever. Their contents consist entirely of selectively abridged law available in its entirety elsewhere and sneering notes and questions, cluttering your memory with inconsistent fact patterns, contorting your understanding through superfluous hypotheticals. Used ones invariably come pre-defaced with someone else's underlining, highlighting, and other nervous tics that belong nowhere near bound publications. And no sane bookstore will ever give you more than half the exorbitant purchase price on a buyback for these monsters, because they hate them too.
Professor Evidence is the only law professor I've had, at either school, who taught his course from a hornbook. Imagine, a hornbook: same Time-Life Library binding and inflated retail price, but full of -- *gasp!* -- actual information that you just might want to look up someday, stuff you couldn't just retrieve from Westlaw with a citation to the U.S. Reports. I kept my Evidence hornbook, which now lives nestled among my Contracts hornbook (a welcome gift to myself upon arriving at this law school), my late father's Future Interests hornbook (a good luck charm), and all my Gilberts (beloved references stripped of all pretension).
Why can't everyone use hornbooks? Or, if the case method is truly so valuable (which I'm happy to posit), why not just give us a reading list of citations instead of requiring us to shell out eighty bucks for an expensively-bound telephone book full of half-cases? And don't even get me started on the thirty-dollar paperback supplements.
I hate these things so passionately, I can't stand to hang on to them a second past exam day. I solve this problem by hiding them out of sight where they can't pollute my mood, in the coat closet or the trunk of my car, until bookstore buyback season begins. They exemplify so much that is wrong with law school: the sneering but-haven't-you-already-figured-it-out educational model, the racket of legal publishing, and the workload which should only be metaphorically backbreaking, dammit.
I should protest and take only classes with copy-shop packets.
Rumor has it that next term's Trusts and Estates class, which already suffers from both an 8:30 timeslot and a Friday meeting, is taught by a professor who does little to redeem the class. It's starting to sound like a monumentally bad scheduling decision, one that I'm not sure my bar-guilt is strong enough to justify.
Fortunately, it's not a decision I've yet had to make. Registration has not yet begun.
In other bad news, both the Remedies and Professional Responsibility seminars -- features of my schedule that I've all but cast in stone at this point -- have exams. The PR exam is a foreseeable quantity, but Remedies is being taught as a two-credit, four-week intensive by a visiting professor with no potential practice exams yet on file.
Decision time arrives tomorrow. Unh. Not looking forward to making up my mind and/or committing to more winter exams. At least I've more or less alighted on Advanced Trademarks as my top seminar-lottery preference. For now.
I'm furthest from a decision on the wild card slot: currently a tossup among First Amendment (offered again in the spring but with a new professor/no practice exams on file), Bankruptcy (not offered again), the Japanese Law seminar (ditto), and Federal Courts. This last is also offered in both winter and spring terms, each time taught by a professor from whom I have previously taken a Con Law class. Professor Equal Protection, a.k.a. the Voice of Saruman, could enchant the topic for me; but Professor Federalism, a.k.a. Old School Socratic Guy, could terrify me into enlightenment.
Tough call. Or coin toss. Or both.
Earlier this evening, I settled in to knock out my psychology paper. "Due 12/1, hard copy," read my notes, "1500-2000 words."
Six hours and exactly 1,999 words later, I am now officially done with my ninth -- and final -- paper of this quarter. (And that doesn't even include all the write-on proposal drafts, which I never bothered wordcounting.) This paper could probably use a revision tomorrow by the light of day, but right now, done is done.
If ever I've earned my vodka and soy milk, now's the time.
For the past two years, Thanksgiving has been a time of much outlining and few family reunions for me. Last year we were here, ordered in from Mambo Grill, and spent the break cranking away at pending responsibilities like Trademarks. The year before, a lovely yet quick overnight in Half Moon Bay was nearly subsumed by my 1L outlining efforts.
This year, for a change, we actually saw family; my husband's mother's side. Many of them now live in southern Indiana, some in houses large enough to accommodate the rest of us as well. (There's something to be said for being a doctor. I wish the sight of blood didn't make me faint.)
And this year, for a change, I have yet to do a word of outlining. Granted, the trip has not been without work: I spent the brief plane flights to Evansville and back leafing through my final Law and Technology packet, in response to which I ground out a 1500-word (well, 1400 and change, which is close enough in this line of work) paper today. But both of the outlines I'm going to need by December 9 remain figments of my imagination.
For the past two terms, I've chosen one class and kept my outline up-to-date fresh for the entire quarter. Perhaps coincidentally, those were my highest exam grades in each quarter. Perhaps I've screwed myself by not outlining obsessively this quarter. Or perhaps I'm a 3L, had quite enough else to do this quarter, and will just knuckle down and pull my outlines together over the next week and a half without impacting my exam karma. I've had a lot less time to prepare for exams before, and things seemed to work out just fine.
Make no mistake: for that I am most heartily thankful.
First paper for Judge Long Distance's seminar, as of the wee hours this morning, is done.
Tomorrow -- today if I can manage it -- my write-on long proposal is due.
In two days it will be Thanksgiving.
In six days my psychology paper (1500 words) is due.
In eight days my final Law and Technology response paper (also 1500 words) is due.
In nine days my classes will all be over.
In sixteen days my exams begin.
Seventeen days from today, I will have officially survived the craziest academic term I've ever experienced.
Ironically, at that point I won't be much farther beyond where I was in July: faced with the twin mountains of my write-on and my spring seminar paper, both of which still remain to be scaled. Although I have set up a base camp on Mount Write-On, which at least is a start.
I can't wait until spring break. If I plan things right, it'll be my next actual vacation.
Spotted, today in school: a fellow 3L towing a pullman backpack...with light-up wheels. They flashed red and blue as she walked by.
"L.," I exclaimed, "that is the coolest rolly bag ever." She grinned right back at me.
I miss my rolly bag. The black backpack is just boring. But even I couldn't pull off carrying a pullman with flashing lights in the wheels.
It's course-selection time again. Seems like I was just doing this. Blame the quarter system. (At least frequent course selection is more fun than equally-frequent exams.)
If my write-on works out for the best, I may be faced with an enormous amount of work next quarter in the form of two cite checks. My clinic might also mushroom into a much bigger time commitment. Then again, it might not. It's tough to do remand motions when you're still waiting for your cases to be remanded. Unfortunately, it's equally tough to predict when those remands will happen or what the district court will care to do with them.
In any event, it would probably be wise not to go courseload-crazy like I did this quarter. Both the clinic and Judge Long Distance's seminar will carry over, so I probably shouldn't commit to more than three other winter classes.
Remedies looks great: a two-credit minicourse, four days a week for four weeks, with presumably no exam. Last winter I had Tax four days a week and found it crazily all-consuming, but it was a four-credit course that lasted the entire quarter and led up to a high-stress exam. This wouldn't. Therefore, this shouldn't be killer. And even if it does turn out to be killer, it will still only last for four weeks.
I was also psyched for Trusts and Estates, but a conflict with Remedies meant that T&E was rescheduled to the 8:30 am timeslot. This already revives evil memories of the sunrise train, but the actual deal-breaker may be that the class meets at 8:30 am on Fridays. Signing up for such a commitment, particularly during the darkest and most inhospitable season here, seems like a recipe for misfortune one way or another. Yet I'm interested in the class, it's not offered in the spring, and the bar-guilt for T&E is strong indeed. *sigh*
The other options are more flexible: First Amendment and Professional Responsibility are both also offered in the spring, as is Federal Courts. It might be wise to knock them off now. Then again, it might be wiser to wait. Time will tell. Professional Responsibility is a seminar this quarter, which would be nice in terms of time commitment.
But the PR seminar conflicts with two other options. One, a seminar in Intellectual Property Litigation, has entertainment potential even though I'm no longer sold on litigation as a career path. There's also a seminar on Criminal Sentencing, which clinic-guilt (and state court clerkship guilt) might compel me to take. On Wednesday evenings, meanwhile, there's a seminar in Japanese law which is exactly the kind of for-a-lark thing I promised myself I'd take as a 3L.
I think I'll feel a lot better about delegating things like T&E to BarBri once it's conclusively shown that *knock wood* I passed the MPRE. If, on the other hand, it turns out that I didn't pass, I guess I'll be stuck with an 8:30 class on Fridays.
Emboldened by a day spent in good company (you should visit more often, Adam!) and a Samuel Adams Boston Lager, I up-and-emailed Judge Long Distance seeking more detail on the first reaction paper for his seminar. Turns out it's due Tuesday, should run roughly the same length as the weekly papers I've been doing for my law and technology seminar, and doesn't require any additional research.
This is good news. The next few days now feel rather less like a pressure cooker.
Not much less, though. I still have about twenty pages to crank out: fifteen hundred words for Judge Long Distance due Tuesday, a ten-page long proposal for my write-on due Wednesday, and fifteen hundred words for my psychology final due the following Monday. Actually, now that I think of it, I've got another fifteen-hundred-worder due in Law and Tech a week from Monday as well. So twenty-five pages (and maybe ten more hours in the clinic) stand between me and exam season.
Exams! They'll want outlines and stuff. I should make some.
What an interesting thing, law school with paper classes rather than the firewalking read-stress-outline-stress-and-exam scenario. It's like being back in college -- only with more work. Yet as much work as I've done this quarter (and it's truly tragic that I can't find a way to get Substantial Writing credit for it), it hasn't been half as stressful as previous terms featuring only exams. Then again, that could be because I didn't have to move house this quarter. And it wasn't winter-dark and freezing out. And I was a 3L and nothing I did was outcome-determinative any longer. Thank God for that.
Fall term exam season is the most generous, anyway; I've got a full week from my last class to my first exam. (Compare spring term, when that lag time amounted to twenty whole hours.) With only two exams, two outlines to assemble, and all sorts of good material shared with me by friends who took these classes last year, exam season should be a relatively low-stress endeavor. And in three weeks the term will be over!
...well, mostly. I'll still have the comment and my spring seminar paper to write. But at least I'll technically be on vacation while those are materializing, for whatever that's worth. Ah, school, the monkey that never gets off one's back...
Currently, my attention span -- never known for its acuity of focus -- is occupied with at least four different pursuits. Part of me is casting about for a psychology paper topic. Part of me is debating whether I'm hungry, thirsty, or neither. Part of me is plowing through the book I'm reading for Judge Long Distance's seminar. And part of me is wondering how quickly my write-on short proposal is going to be rejected.
If I were to examine that last sentiment under the spotlight of full candor, I think I'd have to admit that the rejection will come as neither a surprise nor a tragedy.
I've reached the conclusion that I'm a liar. I've been telling myself since the beginning of this term that I would do nothing but for the love; yet how much have I loved grinding out all these papers? How much did I really relish stammering my way through an unsuccessful moot court round? How much of a thrill could I possibly get out of cranking on a comment during whatever would otherwise remain of my winter vacation after I finished my Second Substantial Paper?
Confession: I haven't been doing any of this stuff for the love. I've been doing it, at best, for the lust, and at worst out of a belabored sense of duty and obligations to fulfill. "The love" has become a JCA term of art, a synonym for the foreseeable sense of satisfaction once I'm done.
What I would love is a break.
And what's preventing me from taking one is this greed, this urgent compulsion to pile on to my plate a helping of every last option on the law school buffet table. An unhappy 1L experience taught me how little I enjoy living with regrets; now I'm hellbound to incur no new ones before graduating. I can't leave a chance untaken, an opportunity unchased.
Yet this is almost certainly a recipe for disappointment. Certainly I'm glad I did moot court, but there is most definitely a twinge in my psyche when I see the semifinalists list posted without my name on it. And while, right now, I can look at the law review masthead without feeling such a twinge, it's anyone's guess whether that will still be true once I've given writing-on my all and still failed to make the cut.
Conversely, if I do make the cut, what joys await me? "You'll have two really bad weeks," my friend F. told me, "when you do your cite checks. But that's the worst of it. Well, unless you become an editor. But as a 3L you wouldn't."
"Can you pick which two weeks?" I asked.
"You give preferences, yeah," she said. "I picked mine during spring break, just to get it all done when I knew I'd have time."
Spring break. But the Japanese Law Society is organizing a trip to Tokyo this spring break. My husband is already a good dozen lessons ahead of me in Pimsleur Japanese.
In fact, right now he's at the gym, Shiny the Ipod at the ready, reviewing such key phrases as "My wife is ill, can you take us to the hospital?" while I'm still all the way back at "The concert begins at eight-twenty PM." I haven't been to the gym today. (I did, however, doze off on the couch in the middle of Judge Long Distance's required reading.)
Ah, heck.
I think I am thirsty. Water always helps. As, for that matter, does wine.
I think I'm getting closer and closer to the point where I'll actually have a moment to catch my breath.
- I'm one question away from finishing my accounting takehome final. (I've been one question away from finishing for several days; my excuse is that I'm savoring the anticipation inherent in being almost done.) Tonight, seriously, I intend to finish. The thing is due November 29, but the thought of one less thing hanging over my head makes a quick resolution all the more attractive.
- My psychology minicourse requires one fifteen-hundred-word paper before I can call myself done with that too. Due December 1. Will be written, hopefully, this week.
- My law and technology seminar has required weekly fifteen-hundred-word papers all quarter. Only one of these remains to be done. Due November 30. Won't be written until after the professor distributes the relevant packet, next Thursday. (I've been piling up all the weekly packets in my locker, just to laugh at the sheer height of the stack.)
- Judge Long Distance's yearlong seminar meets for the first time on November 29, the first Monday after Thanksgiving break. Reaction papers to our first reading assignment are due a week before that, which would be Monday, the 22d, a week from today. I'm unclear on the length or format of these papers, though, and will either need to hit up the grapevine or email Judge Long Distance himself (*yolp*) to figure out his actual policy on word count and footnotes.
- Law review write-on short proposal, revised, went out via email shortly after midnight last night. A rejection within the next few days would be, in the argot of my debating society, "highly traditional." But it just might work out; and even if it doesn't, my commitment to the effort entails only a good-faith attempt. The drop-deadline for 3Ls still trying to write on has now been etched in stone: January 24, 2005.
- Also to be done over winter break: my Second Substantial Paper, thirty-five pages of footnotey goodness that will eventually cause the last remaining blank on my transcript (my spring seminar) to change to a grade. I'd like it to be a decent one. Fortunately winter break is three weeks long.
- But I'm getting ahead of myself: must make it through exams first. Mine, all two of them, are on the ninth and tenth of December. They're going to require outlines. Pulling together only two outlines, though, is not so much a hardship. If I plan these papers right, I should have a lot of Thanksgiving break and most of the week thereafter to get a grip on Admin Law and Crim Pro. Incidentally, if you've got the Gilberts on Crim Pro, let me know if you'd be interested in loaning or selling it to me.
Busy is good. Busy is good. At least this kind of busy is good.
~ ~ ~ waves ~ ~ ~ to everyone else who's taking the MPRE tomorrow.
Er, I mean today.
In less than eighteen hours, this too shall pass!
It's muffler weather, the harbor is emptied of boats, and now is the time for things to start ending. I've got just two questions to go before my accounting takehome is complete and ready to hand in. Fifteen hundred words and I'll be done with psychology. The MPRE is this Friday (gosh, I should probably start studying or something). And as of seven o'clock this evening, fall-quarter Moot Court is over.
It's over! I did it!
I was on breath tonight, thankfully, and what a difference it made. Never again will I walk into an oral argument without having spent a good fifteen minutes beforehand doing vocal warmups. Adjacent traffic on the waterfront highway may not have appreciated my bellowing, but I was surely glad of it. I stood up, spoke, and did not freak out in the slightest. No urgency tonight, no anger, just a sense of peace and satisfaction at reaching a goal. I'd wanted to do this thing, and despite the issue being boring and the timing being tough and the workload being just about as much as I could handle, I did it.
There's a semifinal round after this one, to which the top eight scorers advance; but I have no idea when this news is announced, and am not holding my breath in any event. What will be, will be. I wanted to do moot court, and I did, and that was the point. Anything beyond this is just gravy. I don't have the cycles right now to think too hard about it anyway, with all these papers due and the MPRE rushing up to greet me like an oncoming train.
A week from now, my schedule should be a lot clearer.
It helps, too, that the Booker and Fanfan decisions did not come down today after all. I'll admit to a measure of guilty relief that my clinic workload will likely remain stable for the rest of the quarter, particularly since that work largely involves reassuring phone calls to the worried mothers of the defendants I represent. Moms are the best. Much more fun than remand motions. And I'll be better prepared bandwidthwise to handle a major increase in clinic work next quarter, especially if I don't make the cut for moot court.
And if I do? . . . well, time will tell. But things have a way of working out for the best.
Rumor has it that tomorrow will bring a decision on the constitutionality of the federal sentencing guidelines in Booker and Fanfan. Two of my three clinic cases are stalled pre-remand, awaiting this result. Depending on how the case comes down, my clinic work could see a vertiginous spike in the next few weeks.
At least the first round of Moot Court ends tomorrow.
After much thought, I finally decided to give the interview to the journalist writing about transfer students. The only downside I could think of was the loss of anonymity at Sua Sponte. So I requested that this blog go unmentioned in the article, a request to which the journalist was happy to consent. I may yet remain Googleproof here. (Unless Patrick outs me, of course. ;)
Echoing the sentiments of many a weary student of Admin Law:
"I give up. Now I realize what Mark Twain meant when he said, 'The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.'" (SEC v. Chenery Corp., 332 U.S. 194, 214 (1947) (Jackson, J., dissenting).)
Remaining on the to-do list:
- Takehome final for minicourse #1, which ended last week.
- Final short paper for minicourse #2, which ends tomorrow.
- Clinic research before meeting on Thursday.
- Try not to fall behind in my three full-credit classes.
- Revise short proposal for law review...
...or not.
"There are three main extracurriculars in law school," a trusted advisor told me last week. "Journal, moot court, and clinic. And one person can do maybe two of those. In two consecutive years. If you're crazy."
Let's assume I am. I've already committed to a clinic this year. I have no desire to spend the afternoon and evening of my law school career holed up in the lawbrary cite-checking. ("Because it's there is a good reason to climb mountains," says my advisor sagely, "but not to do law review.") Meanwhile, I've missed moot court ever since transferring, and promised myself while watching the finals last May that I'd give it a shot this year.
Making the time has been tough, though. My practice oral argument for petitioner last week foundered on the shoals of sleep deprivation and my staccato attention span. Perhaps as penance, I took respondent's brief to bed with me on Sunday night. My husband was not amused. "Why are you making more work for yourself?" he grumbled. "You should drop a class, not do more!"
"Remember how you used to tell me that I wasn't working hard enough," I smiled sweetly back at him.
"Well, now you're working too hard! Drop something."
The minicourses are ending, which is good: two credits done and out of the way. I like the rest of my classes enough that I have no urge to drop any of them. The clinic isn't burdensome this quarter, particularly since I can spend my class-free Fridays there unmolested. It had to be law review or moot court.
And today's practice oral argument went much, much better than last week's.
Maybe I just agree more with respondent's position on how to construe the statute (damn you, Angry Clam, for jinxing us with a statutory-construction problem). Maybe reading the brief in bed over a mug of vodka and vanilla soy milk left me better prepared to discuss it than cramming it in the library two hours before argument. Or maybe my dormant moot court mojo is stirring, feeling its pulse quicken, blinking and looking expectantly at me. You rang?
Yes. Let's go with this now. Let's just see how far it flies. I have until January 24 to finish the write-on, but positive moot court feedback -- if this is in fact the 3L time sink that fate has chosen for me -- will come a lot sooner.
First scored oral argument is a week from today.
1.
On the way to the clinic today, Beautiful, my car, turned 50,000 miles.
I bought her new in 1998, back before we moved to California, from a dealer on Route 46 in Parsippany whose showroom and lot would inspire florid daydreams in me every time I passed it by. She antedates my marriage by almost three months. In fact, she and my husband have never quite gotten along; on nearly every occasion when she's had a mechanical problem, he's been at the wheel. On our wedding day she refused to start, the only time she's ever done that.
She's six years old now, old enough to be in first grade. But she's incredibly well-preserved. Could pass for new, even, when she's been recently washed. The fine weather (if not so much the polluted air) in California kept her paint job intact; the people in the giant Mercedes who banged her up that one time in the Fiesta Del Mar parking lot were very nice about having their insurance pay for a full repair; and between the home office (when I worked) and the train commute (when I went to law school), her mileage stayed relatively low.
She's irreplaceable. I mean, I suppose I could drive anything with an engine and a steering wheel, but nothing else will ever be my Beautiful, my first automotive love. "I'm going to drive her forever," I tell my husband, "until someone wrecks her. I don't want a new car." Of course, we'll probably need one some day, a mommy car or something. But until then, Beautiful herself is my baby -- well, my first-grader -- and I'm going to hang onto her as long as I can.
When she first turned 500 miles, I called my father from Interstate 84 in Connecticut. I was driving up to Boston to spend the weekend with my husband-to-be, but "I just wanted to share this moment with you," I jabbered excitedly to Dad. He got a kick out of it. (Like me, he was infatuated with the A4.) Later, when the car turned 25,000 miles, I called him from the intersection of the 85 and El Camino Real. "25,000!" I squealed. "Wow," said he, "way to go."
My father is now deceased, but Beautiful's accomplishments still bring him right into the passenger seat next to me with a big smile on his face. Things of beauty are fine, of course, but what really impresses him are things of value. Things with staying power. He looks out at the waterfront, relaxes in his seat, listens to the radio and nods approvingly. He knows where we're headed. Way to go.
2.
The customer-service lady at L.L.Bean was remarkably nice for someone on shift at 11:30 pm. "Oh yeah, I'm a night owl," she giggled when I complimented her. She was helpful, too: apparently any item ever purchased from L.L.Bean can be returned, at any time, in any condition, for a store credit of the purchase price.
"All you have to do is include a letter saying why you were dissatisfied with the product," she told me.
"I only started being dissatisfied with my pullman bag when the wheels got rusty," I told her. "Oh, and I guess the handle base did come off, but my husband reattached it."
"That's fine," she said. "Just tell us that in the letter and we'll credit you the purchase price."
As of 1:30 this afternoon, the last major indicia of my 1L experience is en route to Freeport, Maine, where it will be exchanged for a gift certificate worth something like eighty dollars. I now carry my husband's old black backpack from college, and you'd never imagine how many miles I've got on me.
"You can get another rolly bag," A. consoled me. "Use your Lexis points. They have some nice ones in the catalog."
But I'm still saving my Lexis points. (More out of pique than anything else, since I currently have 13,825 and the 13,700-point Bose headphones never did reappear in the rewards catalog.) And really, what would I want with a new rolly bag? The old one had survived both a crazy winter and a crazier commute, played itself in the musical, had personality. A new one would just make me look silly. And what would I do with it next year? "Nah," I said, "I'm done with rolly bags."
I'm done with relics. This year is about making new ones.
3.
I'm now a lawyer.
"Wow," I said to Judge Local as he signed my form. "And I didn't even have to take the bar exam."
"Nope," said he. "Some of the biggest things in life are as simple as a signature on a form. Sometimes I tell people this when I marry them -- that it just comes down to me signing a form."
Pending approval by the state government, I'll have what's called a 711 license. This permits me to, among other things, "appear in the trial courts and administrative tribunals of this State" as well as "participate in pretrial, trial, and posttrial proceedings" "challenging sentences of imprisonment." [1] Yay, Blakely remands!
State law requires that I be a member of a clinic (check) and suitably supervised (Judge Local's got that well under control). It looks like I'm good to go.
"This license expires, right?" wondered my husband.
Yes, it expires. But until then I get to be a lawyer, a different kind of lawyer than I'll ever be again. I'll relish it while it lasts.
As though a director had just given a cue, the temperate season here is shutting down. The large decorative fountain in the main municipal park has been turned off and drained, as, unfortunately, has the smaller yet more importantly decorative fountain in front of my law school. (Its emptied, asphalt-lined reservoir is disparagingly called "the black hole" by even our dean.) 90% of the boats have disappeared from the city harbor almost overnight. The sun went into cloud-seclusion a few days ago, and cannot be expected reliably to reemerge until late March.
Midterm approaches. It's high time I sorted through my obscene fall schedule and came up with some sort of coherent plan of attack.
1. Full resolution of my job search is an enormous scheduling relief. Not only do I no longer need to worry about making time (and paying) for interview trips, the pressure to look hireable has also abated. Grades be more or less damned, I will do nothing this year except for the love. To do: call summer firm, share clerkship news, negotiate deferral of offer, then contact favorite partners and promise to stay in touch. Oh, and withdraw federal clerkship apps from the remaining 30 judges who have neither dinged me personally nor registered a full house in FLCIS. Timeframe: tomorrow and this weekend.
2. My first minicourse ended today. Tomorrow it technically meets one last time, but it's an "office hours" session, and since the sole assignment -- a series of short essay questions to answer -- has not yet been distributed, I don't really have anything to ask of the instructor. So I can shut off the alarm clock for once. Ahh, no more 8:30 AM classes for the rest of the quarter. To do: the last two days' worth of reading, and then the essays. Timeframe: this weekend.
3. My other minicourse meets two more times, but has its own stack of reading casting a long shadow over my already-sunless weekend. By Wednesday I'll need to have made my way through a binderful of photocopied articles and book chapters on behavioral science, all of which, fortunately, are fascinating. I wonder what graduate school in psychology might have been like. To do: come up with a topic for my final project, a research proposal. (Imagine, getting a grade just for proposing research.) Timeframe: next week.
4. A week from Saturday is the BarBri MPRE review class on campus; the exam itself is two weeks later, smack in the middle of November. I haven't even begun to think about this yet. Timeframe: next three weeks.
5. I'm enjoying my Law and Technology seminar. I really am. But a required weekly response paper of "no more than two thousand words a week" can wear down even the most enthusiastic legal technophile. After awhile, the piles and piles of reading (a fresh pile awaits us at the copy center every Thursday) seem tame in comparison to the responses each one demands. To do: this weekend's, then the next, etc. Timeframe: ongoing, peaks on Sunday nights.
6. This week I found myself called-on in both Admin Law and Crim Pro. This is good: given the size of both classes, I've got a pass for at least two weeks before I'm potentially up again. It's never a nice thing to fall too far behind in the reading, but when one's time is otherwise crunched, big comfy lecture classes with engaging yet forgiving professors are greatly appreciated. To do: as much of the reading for the next class as I have time to finish. Timeframe: ongoing.
7. My clinic duties have kicked in, and the thirty hours to which I've officially committed this quarter may not even be enough to get through the entire record for the two (possibly soon to be three) remanded cases I'll be managing. My clinicmates, who are handling appeals instead of just remand motions, are way out ahead of me already -- which is fair, since they've all got appellate briefs due in December. For the time being, I just have a lot to read. To do: read it. Timeframe: this next week.
8. This past Tuesday, I gave my first practice oral argument for the intramural moot court competition. It was mildly entertaining, as expected, but failed to set off any fireworks. Moot court as a 1L was a unique thrill, perhaps since it was the only aspect of law school that didn't leave me pondering self-mutilation. Moot court as a 3L still looks to be worth every minute, but when those minutes are in such short supply, the balance starts to shift. Still, I'm doing it anyway, purely for the love, and we'll see where it takes me. To do: research, then second round of practice orals. Timeframe: by Tuesday.
9. I've been advised to push back revising my write-on short proposal until a bit later in the moot court rounds. Apparently it'll become clear soon enough which way my fortunes are headed. Meanwhile, the write-on can wait. Given the balance of my social calendar, it was probably going to do that anyway. To do: revise short proposal, while leaving enough time to get a long proposal and the actual note written by January. Timeframe: not for another few weeks yet.
10. Good grief, I'm up to #10 and still going. Judge Long Distance's yearlong seminar meets for the first time right after Thanksgiving, at which point I will need to have submitted a response paper to the first reading. This sounds like a trivial effort, until you get to the point in Judge Long Distance's intro memo advising us to "be sure to consider the contributions of more than one author." I fear that this means he wants footnotes. Ugh. And speaking of which, could someone please splice another month into this quarter so I can write the paper for my spring seminar? To do: lots of things involving footnotes. Timeframe: late November and early December.
11. Admin Law and Crim Pro both have exams. I don't even know when those are. Decemberish, I guess. By now I should already have started outlining. Oops. To do: some form of exam prep. Timeframe: sometime before I sit down to take the actual exam.
At least I won't have any time to miss the sun.
Actual quote from my seminar reading, which despite evidence to the contrary was not entitled "How To Use Statistics As An Intimidation Tool":
In effect, judicial expansion of intellectual property rights was substituted for statutory changes, as indicated by the fact that a spline regression of the logarithm on the number of words in the patent statutes indicates the rate of growth of words was actually greater in the period before than after 1982, although the difference is not statistically significant.The correct response, on all levels, is out-loud belly laughter.
Unable to make up my mind whether or not to drop any other classes, I finally found myself in the registrar's office this afternoon. There's apparently a form we need to submit to earn official permission to take an excessive number of credit hours.
The dean of students happened by as I was finishing up the form. "Ah yes," she said, reading the hasty excuse I'd penned in the "Reason" column. "'3L, clock is ticking, and I'll never be able to do this again.' I felt the exact same way." She signed my form on the spot.
True that.
Perversely, at this point I'm actually hoping that my can't-say-no options thin out a bit next quarter. I'm going to have some catching up to do.
Pending a handshake tomorrow afternoon, I'm now a member of Judge Local's clinic.
My job is a bit off message, compared to those of my clinicmates: while they'll be doing federal appellate work, as the clinic's sell story implies, I'll be handling motions on remand. Guess I'm just a district kind of gal. (Too bad nobody told the district judges who interviewed me last week. *sigh*)
The only seriously scary part of committing to the clinic -- aside from my jitters at visiting clients in "the pokey," a place I've never actually explored, unless you count the tour of Alcatraz -- is the hours requirement. Thirty billable hours gets you one credit. (For comparison's sake, my psychology mini-course, which meets four times over two weeks, is also worth one credit.) As I understand it, we're expected to book six clinic credits over the course of the year.
So I'm now in a very crowded, snug, practically claustrophobic scheduling-place.
My fall schedule is up to seven line items. In fairness, this is a lighter load than it sounds: only two classes, Crim Pro and Admin Law, have exams, and only one seminar, Law and Technology, requires any serious reading or writing. (Yes, there's still the matter of my spring seminar paper, but that's a bridge I don't need to cross quite yet.) Two classes are minicourses, each a two-week sprint rather than a term-length jog trot. Judge Long Distance's seminar spans the entire year and only meets once this quarter. And Judge Local implied that it would not be a problem to stack the clinic credits later in the year if I were already overcommitted in the fall.
Still, I do think this counts as overcommitted. Getting my spring-seminar paper done just isn't going to fit into this schedule, and I can kiss goodbye to my dried-up dream deferred of writing on to law review. I'm going to need approval from the dean of students since my credit hours broke through the ceiling. I'm still hoping to squeeze in some moot court, but the room's looking fairly cluttered right about now.
It's amusing to think back to this time last year, when I was happily signed up for three classes. True, I was also moving house and interviewing on both coasts. But those efforts, at least, were pass-fail.
I am a Member of a debating Society at my law school, a group which values tradition above most. While I tend decidedly more toward libertarianism than a number of my fellow Members, there are certain traditions which resonate particularly with me. I love being included in a longstanding yet forward-moving trend. In with the old, as well as the new. All are connected. I am a part of all that I have seen.
Today I was invited (in my capacity as Vice President of the Transfer Student Committee -- never let it be said that I slacked in my civic duty) to The Law School's alumni dinner, which this year honored the ninetieth (90th!) birthday of a particular professor and inaugurated an endowed chair in his name. Can you imagine being ninety years old? Can you imagine having spent your life so besotted with an institution that you never left it, gave it the best of your fruitful years, and to this day -- even at age ninety -- contribute substantively to bleeding-edge legal thought?
I fell in love with this professor, without ever having taken a class from him.
I fell in love with the woman sitting next to me at Table 11, a dear lady whose husband had graduated from The Law School in the same year as the featured professor (class of 1937). The husband was deceased, but H. continued to attend law school functions and relished meeting students. Inspired by several glasses of wine, I told her about my first year of law school, my husband, my transfer, my joy at being here, my relationship with my deceased attorney father, my plans to carry his photograph at graduation. She clasped my hands and told me she would not forget this conversation. We scrawled our addresses and phone numbers on the back of our name tags, exchanged them, and promised to keep in touch.
H. taught English in China before World War II. When the Japanese invaded, she, a holder of a British passport, found herself unfortunately classified as an enemy. She spent two and a half years in an internment camp in Japan.
I could not pry my jaw up off the floor.
Upon returning stateside, she married her attorney husband, then expressed her desire to teach again. It didn't happen. "If you worked," she told me, "it told people that your husband couldn't support you." Instead, if you were a woman, you stayed at home and supported your husband. "He would come home, sit down, light up his pipe, and that was that." She was impressed that my husband, who had had to bow out of the alumni dinner due to work commitments, was making his own dinner as we spoke.
I am dizzyingly lucky. Had I been born in my mother's generation, I would have had to convince a frighteningly misogynistic workplace that I was talented and capable of things beyond merely looking cute (which, frankly, I'm not very good at). Had I been born in my grandmother's -- and H.'s -- generation, I would have been packed off into the house as soon as I was married, subject to a duty to crank out babies as consistently as possible.
Instead, my husband gladly accompanies me into the hinterlands, stretching his job across several time zones solely to enable me to attend a law school which has a nationwide reach and brings me joy. Upon graduation, I will have the opportunity to practice law with no one questioning my husband's more-than-adequate ability to cover our living expenses; it will be understood that I am there because I want to be. I am a woman of the twenty-first century. Having children is a luxury rather than a duty. Making the most of myself is the only charge imposed on me by my family and heritage, and will be the only charge imposed on my offspring by me.
But we, the women of the twenty-first century, should never forget that we stand at the end of a long line of those who came before. And paved the way for us.
I got into Judge Long Distance's seminar.
Guess I didn't need Securities Reg after all.
There's still the danger that my credit hours for the term will redline if I get into Judge Local's clinic as well. Right now my courseload makes me happy. I don't want to send back anything else that I've already ordered.
First on the casualty list: Securities Regulation.
Dropping a class shouldn't feel momentous, except for the fact that I can't recall ever having done so before. I've opted out of classes for which I was signed up, yes, but I don't think I've ever actually bought the book, gone to class, taken notes and begun doing the actual work before deciding to bail. Usually I brain my schedule to death so far in advance that there's little room for indecision during add-drop period.
Maybe I should have held on to the class at least until I received confirmation on either the clinic or Judge Long Distance's seminar. Or maybe I've just gotten a whiff of that 3L abandon that says, let go of a bird in the hand. even if you pick it back up later this week, you'll only have missed one class. and why bother going to class today when you're just going to drop it and have errands to run, anyway?
I dropped Securities Reg. I ran errands today instead. The chinchillas now have fresh hay, my husband was pleasantly surprised by a copy of a game he's been wanting, and we're set for food and essentials through the weekend at least. The goal this year is to keep life firmly under control. The 1L firewalk is long over, the 2L crush firmly in the past, and it's about time I got the bleedover under control. If I'm a 3L, and law school can be Just School for everyone else, then there's no further reason why it can't be for me.
Wentworth was sitting on a large, flat stone, surrounded by sweets. Many of them were bigger than he was...Tears were falling off his chin in blobs...
Tiffany knew what the problem was immediately. She'd seen it before, at birthday parties. Her brother was suffering from tragic sweet deprivation. Yes, he was surrounded by sweets. But the moment he took any sweet at all, said his sugar-addled brain, that meant he was not taking all the rest. And there were so many sweets he'd never be able to eat them all. It was too much to cope with. The only solution was to burst into tears.
--Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
Course selection this term is turning into a real issue.
I punted on the decision a few weeks ago, registering for more or less everything that interested me. I'd drop things later, I figured.
Now, with the first day of classes tomorrow, I'm signed up for six classes. And I haven't even heard back on the lottery results for Judge Long Distance's seminar.
Something's gotta give.
To flavor things even further, I got an email a few days ago from one of my school's clinical programs. Clinics are lotteried here, but on an inscrutable schedule known only to their administrators. At various random moments throughout your law school career, the news will come out of nowhere that you've gotten into one. I learned back in May that I'd lotteried into a spot in in one clinic, which I declined. It wasn't my first choice clinic.
This one is. The eminent Judge Local, who runs it, is considering adding a spot to this year's roster. And I'm next on the wait list.
All right, more than one thing's gotta give.
I'd like to keep my confirmed seminar and my two minicourses. All signs indicate that I should take Judge Long Distance's seminar, if I get in to it. But my three lecture classes are a bit more flexible. I could potentially ditch Admin Law without guilt, as it's being offered again next term. Crim Pro is not, but pending the outcome of Thursday's clerkship interviews, I may not need to worry about it beyond BarBRI level. Securities Reg is also fall-term-only, and came highly recommended by a bunch of my summer colleagues; but I'm not on a track to practice straight-up corporate law, and that seems to be much of the point of the class.
I'd been planning to have a go at the school's moot court competition this year, too. My Damoclean write-on remains unfinished. And I still have my spring seminar paper to write. The paper-writing fairy is going to have to fight traffic at this point to inspire me.
I wound up preregistering for more or less everything on my consideration list, with the exception of Corporate Finance. I can always drop things later if they turn out to be the wrong thing at the wrong time. (Japanese is still a question mark, at least until someone in the department either calls me back or responds to my email.)
Then I went and did a freakish silly thing.
I gave my top seminar preference to an unusual seminar, taught by a famous judge from out of town, which meets five times over the course of the whole year. Judge Long Distance is a jurist of some note -- out of my league, if truth be told, and certainly miles beyond my clerkship application list -- and I thought, ah heck, when else am I going to get to meet the guy? This looked like one of those school-specific Unique Experiences that I'd resolved to collect as a carefree 3L.
While dozing on the couch this afternoon, I came to my senses and startled awake. What the hell was I thinking, going for a seminar taught by an intimidating judge and guaranteed to be full of law review editors? A seminar that would almost certainly sink my average and potentially require the equivalent of another substantial paper?
I should go back in and change that preference, while registration is still open.
But I haven't yet.
Maybe I'll really do it. Maybe I'll throw caution to the wind and take a random seminar packed with gunners and taught by a superstar judge without regard to my grade or the paperload, just because I can.
Or maybe I'll get waitlisted anyway, top preference be damned, and manage to avoid confronting the issue altogether.
Actual email from the professor who will (eventually) be grading my Second Paper:
We'd be most happy to comment on drafts, and we have no deadlines for them. In terms of deadlines for the paper itself, there is really only one that counts, and that is our deadline to get the grades to the registrar in Spring '05 so you can graduate.
I'm still going to attempt to get a draft done before classes start, since I can see from here the shadow cast by the massive pile of work that awaits me this term. But it's always nice to give the guilt fairy an extended vacation.
Decision time approaches (and even if it didn't, this is a lot more fun than thinking about moving a week from today. Or, for that matter, thinking about my still-unwritten Second Paper, which is now starting to approach the nervous-guilt threshold).
Crim Pro beat out Secured Transactions thanks to superior scheduling. Much though it would have been fun to take a class that I could have abbreviated "SecX," I just couldn't shoehorn a regular Friday class into my mellow 3L world. Maybe next quarter. Once the sun sets in December and doesn't rise again until March, all the days start to look alike.
So the basic fall-term slate, in its current form, includes Securities Reg (rhymes with "egg" not "edge"), Crim Pro, a technology-law seminar pleasantly devoid of major paper requirements, and...a blank space.
The blank space presents some interesting options. I could use it to do what I'd do if I were at any other school: take an ordinary class. (Front runners for this option are Admin Law and Corporate Finance.) Or, I could disregard my husband's advice to "take real classes" and have some fun with my school's latest schedule-toys.
New this year are a handful of one-credit "minicourses" that meet over two weeks and require neither a major paper nor a final exam. One of them, rumor has it, is actually pass-fail. Two out of the three being offered this term are classes I'd already flagged in the course catalog, not realizing that they were cute and compact as well as interesting. A pair of these would put me on near-equal footing, creditwise, as an actual class -- minus the third final come December. One of the minicourses meets on two Fridays, but I can spare two, even as a 3L. They look perfect, but --
"Japanese!" says my husband. "Let's take Japanese!" The university attached to my law school does, in fact, offer Japanese, and Pimsleur can only carry us so far. But the department does not allow auditors, it's unclear whether law students' spouses are permitted to take undergraduate classes for credit, and at any rate the damn class meets every day at 8:30. Every day including Fridays. If that weren't deterrent enough, the greatest potential drawback is that I might have to take the class for a full year to get credit at all.
"I could maybe potentially make it work," says my husband, who has not voluntarily woken up before 9 am since high school.
I wonder if I could.
There is a paper that has to get done,
That has to get done,
Before you have fun.
There is a paper that has to get done,
Before the summer's over.
There is an outline that you must write,
You must write,
Perhaps tonight.
There is an outline that you must write,
Before the summer's over.
There are some classes that you must choose,
You must choose,
You snooze, you lose.
There are some classes that you must choose
Before the summer's over.
And before you know it you're on the plane,
On the plane,
Back again.
Before you know it you're back again
And oops, the summer's over.
Fall schedule grids have been released, and my tentative plans could well work out. Securities Reg is in a nice afternoon time slot. Admin Law is early, but no earlier than Equal Protection or Evidence last year. The two seminars I was considering are both on Wednesday evening, so that might work out to a coin toss.
Here's my only issue: Secured Transactions conflicts with Criminal Procedure.
Regular readers will assume that the only thing motivating me to take Crim Pro is bar-course guilt. Normally this would be so, but now I'm a 3L and have other things to prioritize: Secured Transactions meets on Fridays, Crim Pro does not.
Secured Transactions would be my only Friday class. A courseload that included Crim Pro would give me Fridays completely free.
Aw, heck.
Our fall-term schedule has not yet been posted, but the full year course catalog made it on to my school's website as of last week.
Turns out I made several unwitting tactical errors last year, choosing to put off until 3L a number of classes that I could have taken as a 2L. Most of those classes -- including such deferred treasures as Negotiation and Mediation, Decisionmaking, and Judge Famous's textualism seminar -- aren't even being offered this year. Way to defenestrate my plan. (And let this be a lesson to me, trying to plan beyond my range of vision! psshhh.)
Remedies is off the list too, which blows my mind: a bar course not being offered in a given year? Ah, the joy of schools that could care less about the bar exam. (There's a mini-course on remedies, but from what I've been told, Remedies is hardly worth a full slot in one's schedule anyway.) T&E and First Amendment are both at bat during the winter term. Crim Pro, alas, is being taught in the fall. I'm ashamed to admit how little it interests me. If there's an excuse not to take the class, I'll find it.
The short list now features a seminar taught by my pal Professor A, along with a pair of classes certain to address my insecurity issues: Securities Regulation and Secured Transactions. (*rimshot*. sorry, couldn't resist.) Front runners for the fourth slot include Admin Law, Crim Pro (if I can't avoid it), and the dark horse, Admiralty Law. Then there are the long shots: European Union Law, Political Process, Public International Law, and other things in which I don't quite believe. I'm holding out hope that some more interesting seminars will appear on the schedule and magically not require major papers.
Oddly enough, no course in ethics or professional responsibility appears on the fall radar screen. As I completely missed the boat on the August MPRE, I'd been figuring that I'd take it at the November administration. Now I'm not so sure. On one hand, I have historically done poorly on standardized tests which tested material that I had not studied in a substantive class. But on the other hand, maybe this is the chance to put the conventional wisdom to the test. The vast majority of my reader-advisors counsel me that all you need to know about bar courses, you can learn from BarBRI. Maybe it's worth a shot at taking the BarBRI MPRE class, doing a few practice tests, and seeing if that's enough to cut it. If not, there's always the March administration.
Course selection brain dump, based on last year's courses [1]:
Remaining Bar Courses
Constitutional Law IV: Speech and Religion
Criminal Procedure
Professional Responsibility
Trusts and Estates
Remedies
Professionally Recommended Courses
Federal Courts
Securities Regulation
Financial Accounting for Lawyers
Courses That Seem Valuable
Administrative Law
Bankruptcy
Antitrust
Conflicts of Laws
Secured Transactions
Courses That Seem Fun, Or At Least Random
Admiralty Law
Entertainment Law
Roman Law
Decisionmaking
Negotiation and Mediation
Legal History of Early China
[1] I'm not sure when my law school plans to release the fall course schedule. Repeatedly reloading the web page featuring last year's courses has done little to encourage them.
Update: Ellen at SportsGal, scant few days before taking the Texas Bar, had this advice to offer on bar course selection.
Grades, actual number grades as opposed to misleading letter grades, arrived in today's mail. Breaking character for one adrenaline-charged moment, I ripped into the envelope while waiting for the elevator with my husband. "Wow, you can't even wait to get upstairs," he remarked. "Why?" I replied. "There's no news here."
I was wrong.
Professor A's class: smack on the median, just like last term, just like I'd predicted. Ah well.
Professor B's class: I didn't smoke it, not like I thought I did. I'm perfectly satisfied with my grade, don't get me wrong, but let's not exaggerate here. Nice grade. Nothing to see here, move along.
My third grade was still blank, as expected. But the fourth and final turned out to be a surprise.
At the tail end of last quarter, equipped only with the last few ounces of reserve I hadn't already burned up on previous exams, I faced down the closest thing to actual fear I'd experienced since transferring schools. My Constitutional Law professor's reputation preceded him. He was strictly Socratic, did not fluster easily, and apparently gave out crippling grades like candy.
But not to me! Not to me! I didn't bomb Con Law! I didn't! I didn't!
(Don't get me wrong; it's not as though I aced it, or even came particularly close. My expectations were just that low.)
A toast: long life and rapidly-improving health to Professor Con Law, who, in the grand tradition of Socratic professors, appears to have taught me some actual law.
Three savory words from my e-commerce instructor in today's email:
Paper received. Congrats!
I drank my Fernet Branca amaro last night, after mailing The Paper off to the instructor and the registrar. Amaro is a particularly nasty-tasting beverage; inspired by a well-timed dose of it last spring, I now drink a ceremonial shot to mark the passing of each law school season. But last night, for the first time, it made me gag and choke.
Maybe I just have that little tolerance left for the law-school treadmill.
If I wanted to, which I heartily don't, I could dwell on this paper just like I've been known to dwell on exams. I'll never be confident that anything policy-wonkish I produce is sufficiently policy-wonkish to register on someone else's scale of policy-wonkism. This paper could turn out, under the klieg light of professorial scrutiny, to be utter crap. I couldn't say. I can never be certain in any of my law school efforts that there isn't something I'm missing, something I just don't get.
Getting It was the subject of some dispute in the A. household last week, as I cranked and cranked on the paper and snapped at my husband when he wanted me to take breaks or talk about other aspects of law. (Sign of a doting law-school spouse: he knows he can't break you out of law-droid mode, so he tries to distract you by bringing up law other than the law you're writing on.) He demanded an explanation for my hostility. I couldn't come up with anything better than a despairing groan that I just wasn't very good at this Law Thing, that I was frustrated because it seemed that I'd never Get It.
It wasn't until he already had grandchildren, grandchildren old enough to watch and remember, that my grandfather learned how to swim. My cousins and I, fresh from a half-dozen summers spent playing in swimming pools, would splash and tackle and dunk each other with abandon. But the one time I grabbed Grandpa by the ankle and attempted to pull him underwater, I got a scolding from my father. "He's not comfortable in the water the way you are!" Dad warned me. I didn't understand how that could be; either you knew how to swim or you didn't.
Now I understand. In law school, you can set a record in the hundred-meter backstroke and still be uncertain whether you'll qualify in in the relay. And, for that matter, be unable to explain why the exact same routine of training and preparation resulted in both the record and the shrugworthy qualifying heat. I envy the 1Ls who are now posting the secrets of their success, just as my peers did a year ago. "You must have *some* idea how you did," my stepfather told me when I refused to speculate on my spring-term exam performance. But I honestly didn't. And didn't even want to wonder. And still don't, even though rumor has it that spring grades have now been posted to the web.
This isn't the fear fairy talking, or the guilt fairy, or even the self-loathing fairy who discolored so much of my 1L year. (Nor is it the paranoid fairy, or the rage fairy, or any of the other isolable semi-autonomous aspects of my personality that have yet to be elevated to fairy status.) This is just an honest pain in the ass. Two years into law school and I have yet to get a handle on it. Some people take to law school naturally, rapidly achieving high-quality consistency with reliable confidence. I lack that intuition, and while I've gotten decent at flying blind, it's exhausting nonetheless.
Yeah, it's time for a break.
I've got an odd feeling about this Paper. It feels like...it's actually finished.
Stats:
Pages: 44
Footnotes: 250
Cases cited: 47
Statutes cited, including bills and model laws: 23
Number of times I cited the Constitution: 4
Number of times I used the words "Supreme Court": 26
Total number of hours spent on The Paper, estimated, since starting to write: 50
Bags of Costco beef jerky consumed: 2
Bottles of Stoli Vanil consumed: 1
Number of times "Obrigado Brazil" repeated on Shiny the IPod, estimated: 12
Number of parties skipped: 6
Number of parties attended, then left early, chased by the guilt fairy: 1
Number of little bottles of amaro that still await chugging, as a final sign of closure: 1
Mirabile dictu: now I can actually enjoy some real honest-to-pete vacation.
Did anyone else notice that Lexis and Westlaw redesigned their law-school pages within a week of each other?
My research continues to take me places I've never been before. First it was the Kentucky Fried Statute. Now it's the legislative history of a goofy series of amendments enacted by the Virginia state assembly last year (mad props to the StateNet bill database in Lexis). I'm actually starting to feel well-traveled, at least among state law. The constitutional stuff, however, remains a hike in the hills, remote and aerobically challenging as ever.
But am I making progress? Yeah, I'm making progress. Is The Paper done yet? No, it's not. But did I hit my goal of 30 pages and 125 footnotes by July 1? Hell yeah. (One hundred eighty-five footnotes, baby.)
It's tiring stuff, this paper-writing, the statutory legwork, the dance of sentence then footnote then sentence-in-footnote. I'm still waiting for the magic moment when the thing miraculously turns into a piece of work, rather than a work in pieces.
The Paper is now at twenty-two pages and 139 footnotes. Under my ex law school's definition of substantiality, and with a more creative use of fonts and spacing, I could be done already.
But I've got more to say. And the deadline has been officially clarified as a week from first-thing-in-the-morning Tuesday, which gives me a good deal more time than I'd expected to finish The Paper without any further nighttime haunting by the panic fairy. (The guilt fairy has been cowed into submission by the sheer vastness of my footnotes.)
Much though I may gripe that my law school never actually gives us a break, I've come to appreciate the beauty of doing this paper now and not a month ago. I couldn't be happier not to have a single outline to worry about right now, not a damned exam on the horizon for six more months. I can come home from work every day, curl up on the couch with a half dozen well-thumbed cases and twice as many minimized browser windows, and crank out another few paragraphs before bedtime. Nothing else to worry about but the task at hand. Slowly (perhaps uncomfortably slowly, but I'm still working on the whole sentence-footnote, sentence-footnote rhythm) but surely, The Paper is being written.
I've got a little bottle of Fernet Branca Amaro in the pantry awaiting the day when it's finally finished, for real.
Footnote 100! Time for bed.
In other news, I have now cited a Kentucky statute in a writing of mine. As in, an actual law from Kentucky. This is almost as giggleworthy as my realization, back in January, that the Cincinnati airport was actually located on the non-Ohio side of the Kentucky border. In fact, I think it's just the word Kentucky that's giggleworthy. I love you, Kentucky.
Kentucky!
Kentucky!
Kentucky!
Sign of the Apocalypse, or at least of the fact that The Paper is going to get done at all costs:
I'd just sat down on the couch, Lexis window at the ready, when I realized how damn quiet it was. I never work without ambient music. Even in the office I keep an MP3 collection of the Goldberg Variations on continuous loop. Unfortunately, my beloved stereo did not accompany us to this coast; all we brought was the cheap little tape deck/CD player from the bedroom.
Oh, and Shiny the IPod.
I didn't expect Shiny to be sitting there in his little cradle, plugged in to the stereo-ette; I figured that my husband would have taken him to work, particularly since hubby had planned to walk the commute today. But lo and behold, there he sat, looking back at me with an expression that, if smooth shiny plastic can have an expression, resembled nothing so much as a shrug.
Why not?
I tapped the play button tentatively and Shiny's screen lit up, informing me that he was paused midway through the last piece we'd been listening to last night (one of the Bach lute suites). I tapped the play button again and the lute suite unpaused, piped through the stereo-ette's miniature speakers, and filled the immediate airspace with exactly the level of ambient music I needed to start working.
Maybe Shiny and I can be friends after all.
Chapter 1 complete. The Paper is now up to page 8, footnote 47. This is about as much fun as tweezing my eyebrows. But of course it could be a lot worse.
The thought occurs to me: I've been thinking of this paper under the wrong parameters. At my 1L school, the writing-requirement policy was explicit and strict: to graduate, you needed to complete a thirty-page paper with 125 footnotes. Here, on the other hand, you need only submit two "substantial pieces of writing." Those appear to be loosely defined as whatever your professor says they should be, although rumor has informed me that substantials are usually 35 pages long.
Lacking any official local guidelines, I've approached this paper as though I were writing it at my previous law school. The operating goal has always been thirty to thirty-five pages, 125 footnotes. But now that I'm actually writing the thing, I wonder exactly what kind of paper can make it to 35 pages and only have 125 footnotes. I've been averaging seven or eight to a page. (Perhaps the reason why this is going so slowly is that very few of those footnotes so far have read Id. Goal for ensuing chapters: use more Ids.) For all I know, this opus could reach substantiality at 25 pages, or even 20.
Thankfully, I've at least managed to write enough to banish the guilt fairy, at least for now. No more haunted nightmares of papers unwritten, hanging over my head like swords; I've got eight pages and forty-seven footnotes that the nagging voice can chew on before it gets to nag me again. And I'm not done for the night, either.
Still, I am a little unnerved at how long this is taking. I'd hoped to make more progress this weekend; now I'm basically resigned to reimmersing myself in the swath of printed pages littering my living room, more or less every night this week, and most likely next weekend as well. But the firm is hosting the summer associates at a ballgame this week and some dinner theater next weekend, both of which I'd like to attend. *sigh*. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Right now, I'm still in that blissful I've started! It's going! stage where each new sentence gleams on the screen like a freshly-minted coin.
I have until July 1. If I do nothing else but work (and work events) and this, it should happen on schedule. No further cause for alarm.
Back to work. Footnote 48 beckons.
A surprising number of people disagreed with me on the work vs. law school vacation thing. It made me kind of sad.
Not sad for everyone who obviously had a better time as a 1L than I did -- good for you if you did! -- but sad since I had previously thought that the firewalking was more of a shared experience, and now I feel isolated.
"School is much easier than work," people agree, and I agree with that too. But 1L was not school. 1L was white-hot pressure, panic, nonstop, everything at stake, my entire plan ready to shatter if I misstepped, and potential missteps practically beyond my control. A year ago, when fellow bloggers like Jeremy would casually post about how law school was just school about law, I would read their posts and choke back tears. How is it not killing you? How? How are you so lucky?
Of course, in the intervening year, I got lucky too. And now I've spent a year at a law school that was, yeah, just school. But it was a lot of school. Constant school. Incessant school. Even though it lacked the furies-in-pursuit aspect of my first year of law school, my second year of law school still had me working like a dog. And it hasn't stopped yet. I don't hate it, not in the slightest, in fact I'm quite fond of the place; I'm just craving a break.
I didn't get one today. This was the day I finally started writing The Paper (after talking about it for months!), and ugh, Kelly was right. No way in hell does an hour of writing get you five pages. An hour and a half of solid, focused, shhh-honey-I'm-busy writing got me three paragraphs and five footnotes before it was time for a sushi break. I made sure to drink several generous cups of sencha to power me through the rest of the evening; if I'm lucky, I'll get two pages done tonight. Fortunately I've done pretty much all the research I think I'll need at this point. Fortunately there's tomorrow.
And the next day. And the next. And so on.
It's been so long since I've written a paper, particularly a paper of actual substance, that it feels as though I've forgotten how. (Moot court briefs, externship opinions and El-Dubyar memos do not count.)
My approach for this one, so far, is to break it up into "chapters" of five or so pages. If I can write seven or eight such chapters, they'll ideally add up to one writing-requirement unit. But individually they're doable. Each one should take an hour or two of research and another of writing, or thereabouts. This weekend is going to suck, but at least it'll suck in a manageable, treadmill kind of way, as opposed to an out of control, runaway train kind of way.
I'm also reading more before starting to write, a change from past practice where I'd do a lot of my drafting in tandem with my research. Some of that will certainly happen this weekend, as I'll be holed up in the library assembling the content of Chapters 2 and 3, but it surprises me how little I've already written (nothing) on everything I've read so far (a nontrivial amount). Of course this could just be me slacking. Or, for that matter, me being intimidated by the runaway train of a thirty-five-page, hundred-footnote paper.
In college, and for that matter in grad school, I never organized my papers with any particular care. Papers -- which were never longer than fifteen or twenty pages -- seemed to spring fully formed from my brain-pan, as though I'd turned on some sort of inspirational faucet. Except when they didn't, in which case I'd cramp and strain and squeeze out something torturous that made the deadline by a few hours and the page limit by half a paragraph or so. This whole high-level organization, research-in-advance approach may be escapism masquerading as productivity, but I still have to figure it's a good thing. Journeys of a thousand miles starting with a single step and all that.
(And in eighty-nine years she ate that whale, because she said she would!)
Transmogriflaw describes 1L as an "eleven month vacation from work."
Wow. It's tough for me to imagine a job so miserable that one's first year of law school would feel like a vacation. (And I've had some pretty crap jobs.)
Even once it got better, even at the peak of my post-transfer euphoria last fall, law school has never for a second resembled a vacation for me. In fact, during that numb downtime immediately following my late-May exam sprint, I found myself looking forward to my own type of vacation: actual summer employment, evenings and weekends with a clear head, a break in the neverending grind of quarters and outlines and impending exams or impending grades or impending exams again.
But there's no rest for the weary, not even after a beautiful Saturday afternoon spent sailing on the bay and strolling around Golden Gate Park. Sunday morning inevitably follows, with its attendant nerve-wracking guilt that can startle you out of a sound sleep. June is almost half over. You've got a thirty-five page paper due on July 1, no extensions, no exceptions. How can you sleep? How can you??
Work...busy...have a job, getting paid, all good...*yawn*...
You weren't so thrilled with your winter-term grades, were you? Are you going to DO anything about that?? This is your last chance to boost your average before spring grades come down! If you are AT ALL serious about this, you will get your sleep-larded self out of bed NOW and go read those cases sitting on the kitchen table.
I printed out cases. I've been thinking about this.
Write. Or write not. There is no think. Are you going to get this damned paper done or am I going to have to curse you with guilty insomnia for the next two and a half weeks?
I want a vacation. I want to go to work and do productive things that impose no weight whatsoever on my permanent record. I hate grades, hate that academic transcripts go on file right alongside my passport and birth certificate as the key descriptive documents of my existence. Work is so much simpler; effort is expended solely toward the goal of satisfaction (your own, the partner's, the client's). No one in real life will request copies of your quarterly performance reviews ten years after the fact as a tool to assess your current value and capability. And yet just last summer I found myself ordering official undergraduate transcripts. Again.
At least once this paper's done, I'll have something like a vacation. The next one isn't due until the end of September.
There seems to be near-unanimity among the readership of this blog that filling one's schedule with bar courses is a waste of time during law school. That is, they're a waste if you're taking them with an eye toward the bar exam; if you're taking them out of pure interest in the subject matter, all bets are off.
I can't say that I have zero interest in the bar classes I've taken, or for that matter those I have yet to take. This is one of the main reasons why I decided to go to law school and not business school: pretty much everything taught here interests me, at one level or another. (Compare all the finance and accounting and other stuff you'd have to slog through in business school; it would be workable, but about as exciting as getting your teeth cleaned.)
I liked Civ Pro. I liked Crim. I loved Torts, even though my grade was awful. Corporations was a delight, as was Evidence. Even Property and Contracts, once I got over personal differences with the professors, were engaging. Con Law, which I've now studied for two consecutive terms, is the closest I've come to *not* enjoying a bar subject, but I still feel that I could hardly consider myself a responsible American lawyer without having studied it.
So I'm already about halfway through the bar-course repertoire, without regretting any of it thus far. It's not as though I've been nixing classes I'd otherwise prefer in order to fit the bar stuff into the schedule; I've completed the intellectual property sequence and taken two seminars on Internet law, exactly as I'd hoped to do in law school. The to-do list is complete. Next year is nothing so much as a big expanse of gosh-what-now. And since this school doesn't emphasize advocacy the way my 1L school did, I'll probably wind up spending most of my 3L experience in regular lecture classes.
So why not bar courses? Wills and Trusts sounds interesting to me. Professional Responsibility is a graduation requirement anyway. Remedies is rumored to be a good capstone class for the end of your 3L year. And could I graduate law school without ever having studied the First Amendment? I'm vague on the concept now; all I know is that you're not allowed to yell FIRE in a crowded theater. Then again, maybe that's all I'd learn in the class.
Crim Pro, on the other hand, I could sacrifice. Or could I, if I want to work in the judiciary? It seems up there with Federal Courts among things that law clerks and staff attorneys should know. So maybe that's back on the list too.
The problem is that the buffet table is too big. Bar courses are easy additions to the schedule, since they're both sufficiently interesting (as is pretty much everything in the course catalog) and have the extra benefit of Being On The Test Later. But how does one decide among Administrative Law, Antitrust, Bankruptcy? Secured Transactions? Conflicts of Laws? None of these will necessarily be useful to me in practice. None of them is something that I feel it's my responsibility as a law student to know (ref. Con Law). But I can't really rule any of them out, either. They're all things that would just be neat to study. (And that's before you even get to such laughably delicious options as Roman Law or Decisionmaking.)
Of course, at the end of the day it's a much more concrete question. Once you're past the "hey, this is interesting" point, you wind up weighing whether it's worth getting up early in the morning (I'd rather not) or enduring a take-home exam (I prefer to avoid them) or dealing with a professor who will likely deflate your GPA (although I liked Prof. Con Law in a movie-character sense). But when you're a 3L, the finish line is in sight, and these choices become all the more significant since soon you'll stop having them altogether.
But I've still got three academic terms to go before graduating, and I won't feel as though I'm wasting them if I take a few more bar courses.
An hour on jurisdiction-stripping, an hour on commerce power and co-optation, an hour on delegation and administrative agencies...and then Con Law I: A Faint Hope was over.
Over.
OVER.
Thank you, wave-senders, as always.
(I'd love to say that I was thrilled to be completely finished with Con Law once and for all, but I'm probably going to be a sucker next year and sign up for Con Law IV: Speech and Religion Strike Back. Damn bar exam. At least it should be more interesting than delegation and administrative agencies.)
I tottered into the women's restroom after the exam, sustaining the closest thing to consciousness I could manage after the week from hell, and happened upon a 1L friend of mine washing her hands. "How's it going?" she said with her characteristic huge smile.
"I'm a 3L!" I said, for the first time, and found myself smiling even wider.
I'm sort of a 3L. I do still have my e-commerce paper to write, dating from winter term and due a month from now, before I'm officially done for the year. And if you're really being technical, I might not be an official 3L until I hand in the paper for the seminar I took *this* quarter, which is due sometime to be determined in the fall. ("Whenever. September. Just email us if you need an extension," said the super-chill instructors when I asked about deadlines.) That's one thing you can say for the quarter system: exam season may be a crush beyond reason, but at least we get double-wide deadlines in our paper classes. Yay us.
I'm trying to place where I was, a year ago, the day of my last 1L exam. I remember that it was Contracts, and that it was much more dramatic than now; I had a whole big freakout the night before, and went wandering on the beach afterward. I remember that walk on the beach. That was when I let go of the exam, let go of the year, finally undid the thumbscrews and shrugged off my dreams of what law school might be. I was ready to accept it for what it was. There were sand dollars on the beach.
I still have some of the sand dollars I picked up that day. They are arranged in front of the Buddha on my windowsill, both for good feng shui and as a totem of where I came from. I take one with me to every exam, tucked in the kangaroo pocket of my hooded sweatshirt.
I did wind up at a law school that is all that I dreamed it might be. And I still accept my 1L year for what it was--torturous, but valuable, much as boot camp or natural childbirth is reputed to be. I was lucky to go to a damn tough school, a school that taught me discipline at a level unequaled before or since. It hurt. I remember how it hurt. But so did Black Mamba's hand when she punched through the casket in Kill Bill Vol. II. I doubted my kung fu a year ago. But my kung fu, such as it is, never left me; I just needed to know where to look.
My summer job starts on Tuesday. I fly to California on Sunday night. In the meantime, I'll be right here.
Good news: my Con Law outline is finally finished, functional, laser-printed and sitting contentedly next to me on the couch.
Bad news: the exam is in less than sixteen hours.
Good news: the exam will be OVER in less than nineteen hours.
This is the only exam this quarter that actually scared me. Evidence unnerved me because of its timing; Copyright freaked me out because of its format; but Con Law, from the beginning, has been the one exam whose content I actually feared.
"Feared" is an overstatement, of course. I have no fear left. But Con Law inspires me to something very much like fear: intense trepidation, dark and shuddery, a wincing unwillingness to think about the thing at all. Professor Con Law is rumored to give nasty exams and grade them even more nastily. "But don't worry about it," a 3L friend told me. "People see his name on your transcript and are just impressed that you took a class with him." Greeeeat.
Of course, it could be worse. This will be the last exam of my 2L year: the concluding flourish of my transition from transfer student to just plain student. (I still have a whopper of a paper to write, but can't imagine that involving much flourish.) All I need is enough energy and focus and presence of mind to get me through lunchtime tomorrow, and then I'll have made it.
Last waves request from this exhausted 2L: nine to noon tomorrow morning, if you could. Many many thanks!
Copyright, check.
I have now officially completed my school's intellectual property law sequence, one of my principal goals before I transferred schools. I even, thanks to the quarter system, managed to pull it off before my summer job began. Rumor has it that the law you learn is irrelevant to the law you practice, but at least I won't be worried that I'm showing up at my firm unprepared.
All things considered, the frightening exam format could have been a lot worse. The biggest obstacle to taking a test like this, I think, is the fact that we've all been at law school for at least two years. In college we'd have all blown straight through it. But here one's expectations are skewed; there are constantly issues you're afraid you're missing, such that you're never confident that a simple answer is complete. We've all grown beards like Kung Fu masters, thanks to our neglect of Occam's razor.
And yet I finished somewhat early, and only hit the 250-word barrier on one answer (which was probably my weakest anyway). The precision waves appear to have met their target. Of course, my grade will tell for sure, but as usual I couldn't guess what it might be.
I think I've also achieved another longstanding law school goal: I've finally reached the point where I walk out of an exam and wipe my feet. No more of that intellectual reflux where missed issues come bubbling up to the surface several hours too late. I seal my exam questions and floppies in the envelope, give them in to the proctor, and am instantly preoccupied with something else (the move, the paper, or today, the oncoming train of Con Law). By the time I even think about the day's exam again, the questions have melted together in my mind and I've forgotten my answers altogether. This is a good thing. Letting go usually is.
Two days from now, I will be done with exams altogether. I'll still have a few days to work on my seminar paper before I fly "home" on Sunday, but as that isn't due until July 1, the pressure will be off. For the first time in many, many weeks.
I can't wait.
Eleven hours until Copyright exam.
Tomorrow, from nine to noon, please send waves of energy, recollection, speed, stamina, and most of all, precision.
'Bout time I learned to be short and to-the-point.
There are all kinds of ways to give a law exam. You can do the traditional 1L timed in-class issue spotter. You can give an eight-hour -- or even, for reasons I just can't imagine, a twenty-four-hour -- take home. You can give weeklong, thought-intensive policy-flavored exams like Venturpreneur.
Or you could do what Professor Copyright has just told our class he'll be doing on tomorrow's exam.
The test, a three-hour in-class deal starting at nine AM, will feature seven multiple choice questions and nine short answer questions. The multiple choice questions require not only the selection of the best answer, but a brief explanation of why. And the short answers are strictly capped at 250 words. We have been advised to make sure our word processors all have accessible and functional "word count" features, since the professor will not read any answers that pass Word 251.
Mind you: all of this precision has to fit within the space of three hours.
At least he warned us in advance. Now I can be nauseous in the privacy of my own home instead of losing my breakfast tomorrow morning.
I took a breakfast break. I took a gym break, complete with shower. I took a lunch break. I even took a break, at one point, to wander around the Annotated Pratchett File (but quickly stopped doing that, since such a break threatens never to end). And yet, despite all the breaktaking, I now have something that claims to be a completed Copyright outline.
I'd be less nervous if it were a completed Con Law outline, but first things first.
Time for a dinner break. (Dinner tonight: salmon cakes, extra-ironic since my post on the subject begins with the statement "No copyright class for me." Same planet, different worlds...)
And that's it for Evidence.
Whew.
Just whew.
Eight questions in three hours is only ever grueling; why do they do this? It's like fitting an entire class into eight weeks, only even more intense. And it's even harsher when the class just ended less than 24 hours ago. 'Course, the flip side of that is that it's all fresh in your mind. Attorney-client privilege? You betcha; we just did that in class yesterday.
Outline, checklist and rule chart have been deposited in the Old Outline Bag; practice exams recycled; and hornbook shelved (imagine, Professor Evidence actually taught from a hornbook worth keeping rather than a casebook that I'd be desperate to resell -- what a guy). Evidence is hereby relegated among the classes I've taken in the past. Thanks for the happy thoughts. They fueled me.
Copyright falls in two and a half days, and the outline -- which right now is just my class notes in outline form -- needs some serious attention. But Con Law is on Thursday, and that outline is in desperate need of a lot more than just attention. While I debate which one to work on this evening, I'm going to indulge in a well-earned workout and long hot bath.
Last Evidence class: check. Eight weeks, 54 pages of class notes.
Evidence outline complete: check. 42 pages, printed and ready to cram.
Number of hours until Evidence exam: 20.
[deep breath]
Ready? Set? GO.
Please think happy hearsay-exceptions thoughts for me from 9-12 tomorrow morning.
I'm unconvinced that this weekend actually happened. Here's what I think I dreamed:
- I spent Friday night, all of it, on my feet in heels, participating in a certain event at an undisclosed location which may or may not have had anything to do with my initiation into some sort of group. Shhh.
- Rushed home at 4:30 am, immediately after said event. Not enough time to shower. Quickly changed clothes. Collected chinchillas into pet carriers, collected our four heavy suitcases together, collected husband, and dashed downstairs to catch our cab.
- Arrived at airport without incident. Chinchillas still cost $75 a pop to carry on a plane. They are, however, the hit of any flight gate full of people waiting to board a plane. "Oooh, what are those? Ooooh! So soft!" They gladly twitch their whiskers and show off, hoping someone will take them out of the little boxes and let them run free. No one does.
- Changed planes in Salt Lake City. More ooohing over the chinchillas, who by then had given up on hamming and had just gone to sleep.
- Arrived in San Francisco airport at lunchtime local time. Took a cab to hubby's office, picked up his Honda (which still lives in California), zipped over to our new apartment building and signed our lease. First month's rent payment is charged to my credit card since my checkbook is several thousand miles away.
- Picked up a U-Haul van. Rushed all over the South Bay collecting various items of borrowed furniture, no two from the same household. Yay, heavy stuff to carry up to the new apartment! My feet reminded me vigorously that I'd spent all of last night standing up in heels. My arms howled in agony at each new piece of furniture they had to heft. Lots of furniture. Apartment is kinda furnished now.
- Dinner break! Hubby introduced me to his newest favorite sushi gig. It's an unremarkable place unless you sit at the sushi bar, befriend a chef named Tak, and ask for the omokase. Then it's remarkable indeed.
- Trip to Target to outfit the place with things like detergent, soap, shower curtain, garbage can, laundry basket, etc. Yay, more stuff to carry up to the apartment!
- Running tally: awake for 38 straight hours, not counting dozing on the plane. Feet hurt. Arms hurt. Legs and head are starting to hurt sympathetically.
- First night knocking out on air mattress with no pillow: ouch. no good. sleep does not happen so much. Alarm goes off at 3:30 since hubby forgot to turn it off after last night.
- Dawn: up and at 'em, it's Sunday, there's ever more to do and our remaining time to do it is rapidly burning off. We dash through the shower and troop off to IKEA. Breakfast involves lingonberries. Shopping continues where Target left off.
- In my most brilliant move all weekend, I lift a flimsy cardboard box of dishes and watch dumbfounded as the bottom gives out and the entire contents shatter spectacularly on contact with the parking lot. Total damage: $5 worth of dishes gone. Fortunately we have not yet left IKEA. I run back in and buy another $5 worth of dishes while hubby ensures that no ceramic shards are in a position to harm the wheels of the Honda.
- Next stop: Fry's Electronics, where we procure a chair to go with hubby's new IKEA computer desk. Unfortunately, the computer monitor he likes is sold out at this location. On to a different Fry's, where we find it in stock.
- Yay, more heavy stuff to carry up to the apartment! I make it clear to my husband that I need a break. We head out and stroll around at a street fair, which disappoints us: no good beer, all out of garlic fries, and my feet aren't hurting any less from the stroll. (They still haven't forgiven me for the all-nighter in heels.)
- Return the U-Haul. Those things are damn hard to drive.
- Last errands of the day: food shopping, including the procurement of a half dozen two-gallon jugs of potable water. Yay, more heavy stuff to carry up to the apartment!
- In the space of less than two days, both hubby and I join the fraud-protection club. He gets the first-class treatment: a call to his cell phone immediately after two purchases at two different Fry's Electronics within an hour. I, on the other hand, have to settle for the ignominy of Trader Joe's declining my credit card. "Unusually high transaction volume," we are both told when we inquire after the problem. "We just want to make sure it's you."
- It's us. We're reasonably sure of this.
- In a last-ditch attempt to relax, we go to see Troy. It's fun. It's also very, very long. We return to the apartment, finally, at about 12:30 am. Once again, I've got a cab coming to pick me up at 5 am. This is just not a weekend about sleep.
- I head off to the airport the next morning, right on schedule for my 6:35 am flight. Hubby and chinchillas remain in California, on Pacific Time, profiting from the granite countertops and waiting for the DSL to turn on.
- Plane change in Salt Lake City for the sheer fun of it. Arrive in time to catch the train back to my building, drop off the now-empty suitcases, and dash down to school in time for the last meeting of my Monday seminar.
- Things I prefer not to think about right now: the state of my VISA bill, the two classes I missed this morning, the emptiness of my apartment here sans husband ni pets, and the Evidence exam that will happen in five days.
- For the record, I managed to look at my Evidence outline a grand total of 0 times all weekend. I should probably look at it now.
My husband is currently playing a game called Hitman: Contracts.
He says it beats Hitman: Civ Pro, but isn't quite as engaging as Hitman: Con Law.
1. There is no anonymity at a school like mine; there is only respect for self-defined boundaries. Fortunately, we have that. Thank you, respecters. I respect you right back.
2. Heartfelt apologies to any and all who may have been offended by personal writings or reader comments posted herein; please email me and I will be happy to discuss.
3. I remain utterly spooked at the prospect of an Evidence exam TWO WEEKS FROM TODAY. There is just not enough time in this term.
4. Back during the World Series playoffs, several of the high rise buildings downtown coordinated a switching-on of office lights such that the building, viewed from outside, displayed the logo of the local baseball team. This impressed me. But today, as I was coming up the waterfront highway at about 1:15 am, one of the buildings on my street (even!) was illuminated in a manner that I couldn't explain, except that I could: it said "Y-ME"
Edit: Apparently the Y-ME lights are part of a breast cancer awareness campaign, which I did not intend to trivialize. "Y-NOT" may be an appropriate response to a whining law student, but is not to a cancer victim. My apologies.
Me, from the living room: "WHY am I taking Con Law?!?"
Husband, from the office: "Because it's on the bar!"
It's Wig-Out Time at the law school. The 1Ls are fit to be tied. The 2Ls are, almost without exception, in the same boat as me. Even the 3Ls, who should be checked out at this point, are moping about and mumbling things about graduation requirements. An LLM friend of mine, running on empty, claims she fell asleep in Copyright "right in front of Professor Copyright's face." She's not alone in her narcolepsy; no sooner do I get home and settle in on the couch with some reading then bam, an hour has elapsed and the light hurts my eyes and I've got an afternoon-nap hangover.
The professors could really help us out here. They could. Bekah pegs it with her usual dead-on accuracy: "Anything you attempt to teach during the last week and a half of the semester is virtually impossible for students to take seriously." (Make that two and a half weeks.)
And yet Professor Evidence, with a blithe shrug, on Monday assigned us forty pages of reading for today's class. Perhaps assuming we'd finished it, this morning he assigned us an additional fifty pages for tomorrow's makeup class. Who knows how much more he'll add to the dogpile for Friday's class. (And three days in a row of Evidence at 9:45 means three days in a row of skipping my morning workout, where I'd normally get much of that reading done.)
"What the hell," I ranted, with mock insouciance, to the sleepy LLM. "It's not as though I have any other classes to worry about. I certainly don't have any papers to write. You know, I think I'll just go read the whole damned book!" But I should be careful whereof I joke. He might actually assign it.
I suppose it could be worse; we could be taking exams now, like everyone else (~~waves~~).
Or maybe that wouldn't be worse.
"You have nothing to stress over," proclaims my mother. "You guys are in good shape financially, you've got no mortgage, you've got no children...you're never going to have more freedom than you have right now."
Somehow, even among all these indisputably positive truths, I manage to find a way to create issues out of whole cloth. My winter-term grades came back lower than my fall-term grades, even Tax, despite the maddening amount of work I invested in it. My Evidence exam is in less than three weeks (the day after the last class!!) and multiple hearsay continues to elude me. A week from Saturday I'm flying the husband, chinchillas, and our checked-baggage-limit's worth of basic chattels out to California, signing the summer lease, then flying straight back here and sprinting the last mile. My Con Law outline is a wreck, my Copyright outline nonexistent. And at some point prior to mid-June the write-on still has to happen.
The end of one's second year of law school is a completely silly, inappropriate time to be stressed, particularly when life is good and we should just be batting cleanup and heading off to our jobs. But suddenly I'm nervous. And I'm not alone. "I keep meaning to chill out," T. says with a quick shrug. "I'm really worried," J. confesses. What's worrying us? Is this just a transfer student thing? "No," says R., who is a native. "I'm in the same boat. I just feel like there's this great...weight on me. So much pressure."
Where is the pressure coming from? Wild spring energy, raising our collective pulse just like sap in trees? Maybe it's shared juju within the law school body politic -- sympathetic panic for all of our friends in Ordinary Time who are taking exams this week. (~~waves~~ to all y'all.) Or maybe it's just a gut reaction to the inhumaneness of an eight-week quarter, followed by exams incoming fast and furious like asteroids before you've even had a chance to print out your outline and take it to the gym.
Either way, I feel like I'm being chased.
I've upped the intensity of my workouts, both to make some effort at returning to my California weight and to vent some of this urgent need to run, run, flee whatever's on my trail. Depending on the day, I either have or have not yet dropped a few pounds; but I definitely look different. My winter puffiness is gone. My cheekbones, jawline, collarbone, elbows are all sharp again. It's reassuring just to see this: I'm no longer curled up and contented-winter-drowsy, but am ramping right up into full-blood spring. Sharpening myself back to my normal acuity. Let it chase me, whatever it is. I'll get away. I will.
Hearsay exceptions, ho!
My dearly Socratic Constitutional Law professor is an old pro at his game. He fields every student question with his characteristic iceman aplomb; even the most absurd assertion will be greeted with "Ah, a consequentialist argument!"
But today I got him to break character. Or at least to laugh out loud.
Apparently, a state statute banning a particular good (effectively prohibiting both the in-state production and interstate importation of that good) is permissible if it can be justified by some aspect of the state's police power. A ban on beef after Mad Cow disease had been detected in the herd? OK, public health grounds. A ban on plastic milk jugs? S'aright s'aright, environmental grounds (paper cartons are recyclable, natch). A ban on fireworks? Sure thing, safety grounds.
Without intending to be flip -- really! -- I raised my hand and asked, "What about small exotic household pets?"
"Household pets?" Prof. Con Law repeated.
"Like hedgehogs."
Prof. Con Law blanched. "Hedgehogs?"
"There are states that ban them."
(Full disclosure: I have two chinchillas, which count as small exotic household pets but are legal in most states -- thanks, or no thanks, to the fur industry. I have never had a pet hedgehog. But they're damn cute, and I think that if you want one, you should be able to have one, police power and commerce clause issues notwithstanding.)
"Pet hedgehogs?" He furrowed his brow, in search of a state police power that would be relevant to the prickly little guys. "People keep...you mean...and they're illegal?"
I nodded.
Professor Con Law quickly recovered his cool and resonantly declaimed, "Would you like a pet hedgehog, Ms. A.?"
The entire classroom erupted in a giggle, myself and the good professor included. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought he winked at me.
"Well, I can't think of a police power that would justify banning them, so there you have it."
Tempted though I was to approach Prof. Con Law's desk after class to tell him all about the joy of small exotics, I had to run to seminar. A shame, that. I bet he'd get a huge kick out of Enzo.
G R E E T I N G S Capricorn
Spend quality time in the wonderful world of research and development. Your harvest is rich. No matter how far you cast your net, you can still sort easily through all the little things that you catch. You love this part so much that it's almost a shame to move on. But you're just at the beginning, and you want to keep your hand in this process all the way through. Having a plan gives you confidence in your ability to carry it out. Anyone that can see through the framework of the final product will recognize your style.
Today the draft will begin. Or at the very least, this weekend.
Ever wished you could influence a ranking system? Now you can nominate up to 10 of your favorite professors for inclusion in the "Law Prof 100," a list of the hundred most influential law professors in America.
I say let's start a blogroots campaign to get Eugene Volokh, Stephen Bainbridge, Gordon Smith and Brian Leiter (the one in Texas) onto the list.
(Link courtesy of my e-commerce instructor. *wave*)
I never used to have any allergies as a child. I blame the flowers constantly blooming in California, something they never did more than once a year while I was growing up. Somehow, my tolerance was worn away by constant exposure to the stuff. And now, here I am, back in a country of shifting seasons and paying the price.
It's finally spring, I think, despite the fact that the daytime high temperature varies about forty degrees Fahrenheit in any given week. All the trees are in leaf, the grass is a real *green* green again, there are tulips and daffodils and a zillion dandelions on every unpaved surface you see. My throat took on the texture and flavor of hot asphalt a few days ago, and the reaction finally migrated up to my sinuses yesterday evening.
"Are you getting sick?" asked my husband, who is under a deadline (again) and can't afford to catch anything from me.
"I think it's just allergies," I sniffled.
"Take a Claritin."
But I couldn't find any, and wouldn't determine until much later that he'd stashed them all in his clothes closet. (In case the chinchillas got into them? Who knows what motivates men to hoard medicine.) Meanwhile, I took a Benadryl that did nothing, drank some tea that did not much, and continued on down the slippery slope. Slippery is a good word for spring allergies; between my watering eyes, running nose, choking throat, and Kleenex-soaking sneezes, I felt like a sponge being wrung dry.
At 4:30 this morning, I rolled over in bed and somehow sent myself into a paroxysm of lung-wracking coughs. Hubby sat bolt upright and, with that preternatural clarity that comes from panicking in one's sleep, called out: "Okay?"
"Shh," I said as soothingly as I could between tracheal spasms.
I retreated to the living room, found a Ricola lozenge in my pullman bag, and returned to the bedroom with it wedged between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. For some reason this stopped the coughing, and moreover lasted almost miraculously until I finally woke up at about 10.
"You sure you're not getting sick?" hubby asked me again.
"Telling you. Allergies."
"Take a Claritin."
But I still didn't know where they were, and telling him he'd run out would mean a trip to Costco to get more and all I wanted to do was curl up and doze and make it go away.
Instead I went to Copyright, hopefully offending a minimal number of people with my sniffling and sneezing and noseblowing. "Are you getting sick?" C. asked me. "No, I'm just allergic to spring," I groaned.
But so, apparently, was Professor Con Law. "CLASS CANCELLED TODAY 4/27; PROFESSOR IS OUT ILL" read the notice posted on the classroom door. "Aw, man!" I affected disappointment, then lit out of the building and headed home to my welcoming living room couch. The dormant commerce clause could wait.
Stretched out on the couch, copyright casebook in hand, I finally managed to get some rest. "I'm going to the gym," hubby called out. "Good for you," I called back, and proceeded to nap for the next hour and a half.
And then the nasty internal debate began.
How can you sleep? You have no time to sleep! You should be working on your paper!
Paper? WTF? Have you seen the state of your Con Law outline?
Whatever! Have you even *started* working on Copyright?
That paper is going to take you *forever*! Everyone else is working on their papers now!
You've got exams in three and a half weeks!
Evidence! Fear Evidence! Don't you fear Evidence? You should fear it!
If you want to use that paper as a write-on it's got to be done by the time exams start! When do you *think* it's going to get done?
Your outlines, when do you *think* they're going to get done?
In your goddamned sleep????
I woke up.
"Can you make some dinner?" hubby asked, hurrying past my couch with his laptop balanced on one hand like a waiter's tray.
I nodded.
"Have you lost your voice? Are you sick?"
"Doe," I croaked. "Sore throat. Allergies."
"Take a Claritin."
"Couldn't find any."
He checked -- "Hmm, you're right" -- and a moment later produced one from his closet. "Here."
I swallowed it. I made potstickers for dinner. And now, ideally, I'll wake up a little, knuckle down to work, and shut up at least one of those voices.
Time for another cup of tea.
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
The fountain [1] is running again, pixillating the reflecting pool [2] and misting the glass wall of the classroom corridor with each successive gust of wind [3]. A cancelled Evidence class had been rescheduled to this morning, so I found myself on campus early enough to notice things like the fountain, the actual flavor of a Chai Tea Luna bar, and the fact that Professor Evidence [4] was wearing a dark-green tie that perfectly matched his understated ash-green shirt [5].
I ran into Professor Trademarks [6] in the elevator. He asked me if I was taking Copyright this term, and if I was enjoying it as much as his class. I needled him about the multiple choice on his exam. He was a good sport [7] and opined to Professor Evidence, who was also in the elevator, that more professors should give multiple choice exams. I expressed a contrary opinion. (I hope Professor Evidence agreed.)
J. and I, through a positive exertion of peer pressure, finished all our reading for our afternoon classes before heading out to an event over on the undergraduate side of the university campus [8]. It was a cello recital [9] by a 3L [10], featuring, among other things, a sonata by a Romanian composer which was entirely new to me. Ahhhh. Revelation. (In the event that you read Sua Sponte, 3L cellist, your playing was ABSOLUTELY ASTOUNDING.)
J. and I practically skipped back to our Copyright classroom, where a lunchtime talk by the Environmental Law Society on market-based solutions to environmental problems [11] was just ending. As with most lunch talks here, this talk had been catered [12]; but unlike most talks, which feature pizza, the catering for this one was Middle Eastern [13]. I snagged a leftover falafel, bit into it, and experienced perfection again -- the second time today after the 3L's impassioned third movement of the Martinu. The falafel was perfectly crunchy outside, perfectly moist inside [14]. J. had grabbed several and gave me one of his as well. J. is also a transfer student [15]. I love transfer students. Everywhere.
I had invited a guest to Con Law, an admitted student pondering spending three years at this school. We then went to the student bar [16] and discussed choosing a law school. I did my best not to gush, but was having one of those brilliant days [17] -- a day where you fit into your environment with a particular resonance, like a lacy wrought-iron key clicking sonorously into a massive lock. I hope I did not overly discourage the admitted student with my rant about missed opportunities increasing logarithmically with age. Apologies either way.
I got home, threw together a quick dinner, and managed to pry my husband away from work in time for us both to attend the first event sponsored by a new law school organization dedicated to epicureanism [18]. We found ourselves at a fancy French hotel downtown, nibbling puff pastries stuffed with cheese and walnuts [19] and, eventually, participating in an actual kid-you-not Scotch tasting [20]. We recommend the Cragganmore and the Talisker.
We walked home from downtown [21]. When the wind blows just so, you can spread your arms, stand on tiptoe, lean into it, and feel like you're flying [22].
Could life be better? Maybe, if my husband weren't telecommuting. But not much.
If you've ever wondered how your life might be different if you went to law school overseas, check out Shetai's great post on the law course at Cambridge. It looks like you'd be writing a lot more papers, for one thing.
As you work your way up through the law school hierarchy, your mail-drop spam evolves from scary LEEWS flyers to completely unscary bar-review promotional material. This is a good thing, if only for the laughs.
To wit: the following, on a folded-up card, appeared in my mail folder today. I here reproduce verbatim the most eye-catching parts thereof, along with a question: would you be inspired to go out and take the Patent Bar after reading this?
Earn Money While In SchoolEarn money as a Patent Agent while in School. Just pass the Patent Bar Exam administered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO") and you will be qualified to prosecute patents as a Patent Agent. To become a Patent Attorney, you must pass the Patent Bar Exam and the State Bar Exam.
USPTO Announces Major Exam Changes
* Exam is Computerized.
* Exam is administered every business day.
* Exam is closed book. An on-line version of the MPEP will be available.The Patent Bar is Computerized
[photo: hand with #2 pencil, filling in scantron ovals]Substance Is The Same
The exam will continue to be a 100 question, multiple choice exam with questions and answers developed from patent laws, rules, and procedures as related in the MPEP and policy statements issued by the USPTO. [...]"I never had an IP course. I attend a non-ABA law school, worked full-time with a small family, but with the help of BAR/BRI Patent Bar Review, I passed the Patent Bar on my first try. Please thank all of the BAR/BRI Patent Law Staff" -- Reggie N., October 2003 exam
Those LEEWS days are gone indeed.
It's hard. Entirely too many items languish unattended on my to-do list, and yet my engine is idling and refusing to rev.
It's not putative depression, this time; it's just reality, being itself, tending toward the unremarkable. Not life as a pit, but life as a treadmill. Even such an insufferable Pollyanna as JCA has Days Like This, of which mama said there would be legion. And while JCA with a full tank would still be finding a way to appreciate Days Like This -- after all, no such thing existed during the protracted firewalk that was last year -- JCA right now is unimpressed.
It is, of course, a particularly reflective time of day to be pondering this stuff. The vertical hands of the clock cast their own shadows, and I'm sitting in them, shivering. Herein my efforts to study Evidence pre-emptively (the exam is now officially scheduled for the day after the last class, heaven help us all) wither and diminish. My write-on/substantial seminar paper remains guiltily, distressingly unwritten. The thought of having to pack and move again in a month, when I just did that so recently, mushrooms into a sickening logistical quagmire. The fact that I will potentially be finalizing my summer living arrangements in California on a date when I really need to be here rankles unduly, as does the fact that a blog I admire and respect has removed Sua Sponte from em's blogroll. And so on.
The spontaneous heat and stuffiness in our apartment, the apathy of my chinchillas when I could really use some household-pet-love, my husband's earnest "Do you want to do that Evidence flowchart tonight?", and the neverending ambient white noise of the HVAC and the elevator and the traffic on the waterfront highway 33 floors down...they stack up, dogpile, cast their own shadows as well.
I blame several things for this funk. Sleep deprivation, of course, is a prime suspect: I'd like to find whatever force of nature has made it a rule that no member of the A. household is permitted to fall asleep before 2 AM and kick it in the relevant regions. Nor does it help that I've gone on a kamikaze low-calorie-intake, increased-workout-intensity kick of late; I've got eight pounds of transfer/winter weight gain to unload before returning to Skinnyland on Memorial Day. The glass of chardonnay currently resting astride my evidence hornbook probably isn't helping, either.
Reading a preview of this post, I'm struck by the extent to which I've redefined "self-indulgent whining" in the past year. Last February, I frantically emailed Anonymous M, detailing my rabid dreams of coming down with some awful disease that would compel me to take medical leave and thereby enable a graceful exit from law school. (Rereading old emails: another thing that does not help one's mood/energy level whatsoever.) The blog, of course, was as upbeat as ever; I never would have permitted myself to air such sentiments publicly. Now I discourse with untoward facility whenever I feel the slightest bit bummed. Sorry about that.
Methinks it's that thing called bedtime. Things will be clearer tomorrow. Or rather, later today.
JuBu and Heidi, among others, are currently engaged in course selection for the next academic term. I wish I could join in. I love playing scheduling games. But my school marches to the beat of its own drummer.
"Is the fall-term schedule even available yet?" I asked at the registrar's office.
"No."
If hearsay is anything to go on, we'll be choosing our fall classes while all the law schools in Ordinary Time are aswirl in spring-semester exams. That's kind of neat, except when you balance it against the fact that we'll still be taking exams well after most people's summer-associate gigs have begun. Damn quarter system.
I imagine that my fall-term schedule, whenever it comes up, is unlikely to be anything spectacular; my course-selection maxims, like my sensible shoes, are unexciting at best. But there's no shame in pragmatism, or if there is, then I guess I'm just shameless. My plans include:
- Bar courses. I'm over the *yolp*-I'm-clueless-about-the-Constitution thing, but old habits die hard. Crim Pro, Con Law IV, Wills & Trusts, and Remedies still remain on the to-do list. (As does Community Property, which is -- teehee! -- not taught at this law school.)
- Graduation requirements out of the way as early as possible. By the beginning of fall term this year, I should have fulfilled my writing requirement; by New Year's, professional responsibility should likewise be out of the way. Goal: to save the sunset days of law school for minimally stressful things.
- Intellectual Property course sequence. Complete as of this term. Love the quarter system.
- Jurisdiction in the Federal Courts. An implicit requirement for any wannabe judicial clerk, even if I'm not one of those "ooh, a perplexing chestnut! sign me up!" kind of people.
- Negotiation, Decisionmaking, or some other fun semi-psychological class. Extra points if roleplaying is involved.
- At least one completely random seminar, most likely on law in a society that I've never studied before...just because I can.
- At least one class in another department. There's an entire university attached to this law school, and I should be profiting from it.
- Extra points to any course taught by a famous local personality (professor, judge, etc.); it'd be a shame to miss such an opportunity.
My problem is that I've run out of limiting factors. "You're taking Tax just because you think it's interesting??" a chagrined Adam exclaimed at me back in December. "Why not take, oh, Admiralty Law?" To which I responded, "Yeah, why not?"
I have no reason not to take Admiralty Law, Bankruptcy, Antitrust, Secured Transactions, Admin Law, or a good two-thirds of the course catalog. And even things that I do have a reason not to take -- missing prerequisites, for example -- I still gladly imagine on the roster. "I'm such a fan of this professor," I'd say of the worthy responsible for teaching me both Corporations and Tax, "that I'm going to take Taxation of Corporations II just to have another class with him." I wound up not doing this, but I do miss the guy, and I bet I'd love the class.
It'd be interesting, at this point, to take a class I didn't like. Just for the experience.
There's a particular type of professor that prelaw students fear: the Old School Socratic Guy, whose personality has been enshrined in so many war stories that he has become somewhat of an urban legend. He -- it's almost always a man -- will call on you at random, latch onto you for an uncomfortable period of time, and grill you on nine-tenths of the things you didn't understand in last night's reading. No matter how intently you highlighted and briefed, no matter how many times you read the case in search of ephemera that only he would care about, he'll still manage to leave you feeling like a scolded child.
There actually aren't very many of these worthies left in the academy, from what I've seen. I had exactly one as a 1L, the august Professor Civ Pro (who, perhaps coincidentally, was one of my favorite professors). When he wanted to be, he could be super-scary: he'd call on you and stay with you for the entire class hour, combing through cases in such detail that sometimes it would take several days to finish one. It was a frightening prospect even if you were a fan.
This term, I discovered my first Old School Socratic Guy at my adopted law school. Professor Con Law is lifted straight from the legends: tweed jacket over wool sweater over dress shirt, Alastair-Cooke-esque cadences in his speech, and a pointed gaze that would have 1Ls wetting themselves. On the second day of class, he called on someone and then stared straight at me: "Ms. S.?" After an uncomfortable twenty seconds, I volunteered, "Um, I'm Ms. A." Without skipping a beat, he replied: "I know. I called on *Ms. S.* I was looking behind you, Ms. A., not through you." (In fact, that's exactly what he was doing. But I shut up anyway.)
Fortunately, Con Law is not a 1L class at my school. Our class of maybe fifty or so is a mix of 2Ls, who still do our homework, and 3Ls, who are having nothing to do with the professor's Old School Socratic Method. "I didn't do the reading," they announce matter-of-factly when called on. Even the 2Ls are chill enough to have some fun with the Method: the most popular answer to a Prof. Con Law missile is "I'm sorry, could you repeat the question?"
Like Prof. Civ Pro before him, Prof. Con Law has a reputation for giving tough exams and grading them even more harshly. (I wonder if these gentlemen have ever met. It's amusing to imagine a sort of Old School Socratic Central Training Center that cranks them out.) I suppose this could represent something to worry about, if I were still in the business of seeking out things to worry about. But if my previous experience is anything to go by, I'll bet that his exam code is crackable with sufficient effort.
That's one thing to value about Old School Socratic Guys: they may play hard, but by and large, they play fair. Even if "fair" is defined as "by my rules," those rules at least stay constant. You just need to figure out what they are. It's kind of like playing Mao: equal parts frustrating and tantalizing, but ultimately, you hope, entertaining.
You hope.
I suppose I should say something about the new law school rankings, as everyone else seems to find them a propos of something or other.
Everyone rubbernecks when the rankings come out. As someone who's been accused of being unduly obsessed with status, I now make an effort to avoid them in case the accusations are true. But when I saw that link I looked, just like you did. Admit it. Could we really avoid looking? And, law students past and present, could you truly deny that the first thing you did was to find your school on the grid?
Glorfindel suggests that the reduction of the law school gestalt to a sequential prioritization of schools is a slippery slope towards actual evil. Waddling Thunder, the student blawgers' unofficial Defender of the Corporate Faith, can respond to this better than I. But I will say that from my own perspective, an increase in opportunity is never an inherently bad thing. And to me, that's perhaps the single most valuable thing a higher-ranked school provides.
Glorf posits that people attend highly-ranked schools primarily because they offer better-paid options after graduation, as though the main motivators for choosing a law school are such hollow and meaningless things as money and fancy firm business cards. I can't help but disagree. My post-graduation dream job pays unremarkably, and my academic record is such that I'm unlikely to land in a position of notable prestige. Yet coming from a single-digit school on the USNWR grid is inestimably helpful if I intend to pursue the gig with any seriousness. Being here isn't just about being seduced by high salaries; it's about having choices. I've been surprised, since transferring here, at the number of people who have no intention of going BIGLAW. What's important is that they can, should they ever desire or need to. It's just *one* of their options.
The dirty secret that no one's allowed to acknowledge outright without being branded elitist is that options really do decrease as you move down the scale. Whether this is a cause or effect of the rankings is debatable; I'm in the effect camp, hence the following screed.
Hardworking, motivated, and damn lucky people are everywhere and will almost always get their due, but let's be frank here: the worst aspect of the rankings is not that the people on top are lured to sell their souls to Mammon, but that the people further down the list get screwed. My ex-law school slipped in the rankings again this year, and that's going to hurt people studying there, and that's wrong. Jockeying with those silly numbers we all revile will actively diminish the payoff for the people still working their asses off at solid yet unfancy schools. But let them eat cake, right? More important that we posh types should refrain from selling out.
I can't agree with that. And that's my problem with the rankings. The real issue isn't who feels the most insulted by the fact that [school] has dropped out of the top ten, or whose faculty publishes the most prolifically, or that students will be drawn to high-ranked schools by their fancy numbers and fall prey to firms doing the Dance of the Six Figures. The real issue is that, thanks to a silly system of categorizing disparate experiences, talented people will reap less than what should -- and elsewhere would -- be the full fruits of their labor. And it bothers me, even with all the hemming and hawing about how rankings are crap (which they are), that people still construe them at a macro level as a proxy for merit.
Let's pick a story and stick to it. If we say the rankings are meaningless, then let's not grant them meaning. Or let's turn them into something meaningful. Professor Bernstein has the right idea (and I'm not just saying that because of where I go to law school): introduce competition into the rankings game! Let's get some other major publications opining about who's on first. Even if the usual suspects all stay within a few standard deviations of their USNWR berths, their reasons for being there will be independently verifiable.
Personally, I think there should be a score for student-body competitiveness. But that's just me.
Yesterday was a love-the-quarter-system day. Sixty-five degrees out, a cloudless sky that M. dubbed "the perfect color that skies are supposed to be," and a fresh slate of classes that still retain the luster and excitement of sheer novelty. Professor Con Law, an elder statesman among the faculty with a reputation for being hardcore, told us fervently: "This is federalism. This is important. You care about this. You have opinions on it. This matters to you." And I found myself believing him. Even judicial review is fascinating on a gorgeous spring afternoon, leafing contentedly through Marbury v. Madison over a plate of bul go gi.
The flip side of this quarterly joy will come in two months' time. Spring-term exams are actually a bit more flexible here than fall or winter, when the schedule was strictly four days of reading period and then five of exams. This term, though, the four-day reading period before crunch time is also the "early exam period," which on its face sounds great for 2Ls interested in hoofing it out to our places of summer employment as soon as possible.
But taking exams during the early period basically means having no reading period at all.
"That sounds like the best plan," concluded my husband. "Get it all over with up front, and then we'll have a few days to pack and get ready before we head back out to California."
"Dude," I protested, "I can't take an evidence exam the day after my last evidence class! Even if I keep up with my outlining all quarter, I'll still have no time to do practice exams."
He thought for a moment, and then proclaimed: "You start a week before the end of class."
I guess I'll have to. The only other option is to take the evidence exam during the regular period -- on the second-to-last day of the regular period, to be precise. Two days before I'm expected at my summer firm. One day before our move-out deadline, if we want to be remotely settled in California by the time hubby and I both need to show up at our respective places of business with our act together.
I can't seem to make up my mind which is actually the lesser evil: take the evidence exam the day after the last class, or the day before you move?
I've officially been bumped from the ethics seminar; it's been restricted to graduating 3Ls. Ah well. Shouldn't be too problematic to fit it in next year, at some point, or just do it the old-fashioned way and take a regular lecture course in professional responsibility. I elected to go the seminar route back at my ex law school; maybe it's time to rethink whether that's the best plan here.
The only drawback to this change in plans is that I'm now uncertain how to approach the MPRE in August. If I had the chutzpah of the Angry Clam, I could just walk in and take it without any preparation. (Unlikely.) Several 3L friends (including, ironically, at least one who's currently enrolled in the seminar that I can't take) tell me that the BarBRI review and a day or two of studying is all that's required to pass the thing. (Possible.) And there's always the easiest way out: procrastinate, kick the thing back until November or later, and remain happily unaware of the canons of legal ethics until then. (Also possible.)
Any and all advice is welcome.
Meanwhile, I'm fortunately not screwed for seminars. I actually lotteried into two: one on criminal justice and cyberlaw, and another on intellectual property and the regulation of information. Alas for criminal justice, fun though it sounds; it meets from 7-9 pm on Mondays. Now that there's actual daylight for more than six or seven of my waking hours, I feel the strange need not to take nighttime classes. Maybe it's spring fever. Maybe it's spring.
For the first time in recent memory, I managed to take an actual vacation.
I felt badly, sometimes, that I was hogging all this time to myself without writing a word or thinking a single substantive thought. But the horses were so calm and happy, the puppies so joyful and tumbling around your feet, the weather so perfect, and then Costa Rica, ay, Costa Rica, and what human could fixate on the Twenty-first Amendment when there was so much out to be chilled?
Spring classes start tomorrow and I'm actually ready. This can't be a coincidence. No clue how I did on winter-quarter exams; still don't even know my average from fall quarter; and it's all good, because I finally, finally, figured out how to wipe my feet and walk away. And thanks to that, I'm ready to come back.
(And get to work on the paper I should have spent my horse-and-puppy time researching. Yet...no regrets.)
Happened today upon Prof. Burgess-Jackson's page of advice for undergraduates considering law school. Principal among his recommendations is that the larval prospectives major in philosophy.
Where I grew up, in New Jersey, this is called representing.
It's not surprising that a philosophy professor, clearly satisfied with and enthusiastic about his field of choice, should suggest it as the ideal path to the study of law. Quoth he: "The skills needed by law students and attorneys--careful analysis of texts, sensitivity to vagueness and ambiguity (these differ!), extraction of principles from cases (i.e., imposing order on chaos), argument (often for propositions that one does not personally accept), criticism of arguments made by others, and the articulation of difficult concepts--are precisely those that are inculcated and refined in the study of philosophy."
And the study of English, I'd argue. Not to mention the study of political science, history, or classics. Any good foundation in the humanities involves practice in the skills Prof. Burgess-Jackson enumerates; any university dedicated to the principle of a Liberal Education (as was my alma mater, to such an extent that my pragmatist father was ready to walk out on the information meeting) has Prof. Burgess-Jackson's bases covered even through the hard science majors.
Personally, I've never been inclined toward philosophy. Over dinner in December, I appalled my most excellent mentor (himself a degreed philosopher) with the announcement that I was planning on taking Tax -- and was actually looking forward to it. He opined that it was a waste of space in both my schedule and my brain-pan, which could instead be dedicated to such august pursuits as History of Legal Thought. "I'm no philosopher," I protested by way of excuse. "I'm an intellectual functionary."
Blame it on the aforementioned pragmatist father, perhaps, or any number of equally-pragmatic relatives who raised me on "What are you going to do with that?" I majored in linguistics as an undergraduate not because I loved Chomskian syntax, but because I delighted in the idea of being fluent in multiple languages. (I was, for awhile -- both fluent and delighted.) Classes that taught me Stuff I Could Take With Me were good, solid things. And familial pressure aside, I liked them. The only philosophy course I ever took -- although I was long intrigued by one called "The Problem of Evil" -- was introductory logic, mostly because it was taught by a dear friend of mine.
Logic turned out to be handy. And "The Problem of Evil" probably would have been fun, if I hadn't been in such a hurry to graduate college. But I can't say that the lack of philosophical training in my undergraduate career has harmed me in law school.
Honestly, what I wish I'd studied more is economics.
It probably doesn't help that my law school is the Law and Economics Capital of the Known Universe. My Trademarks class, last term, was taught by a Ph.D. economist. Economic arguments turn up in the damnedest places here: ethnic-club luncheons, debates on the Fourteenth Amendment, even a group of 2Ls deciding where to grab dinner after musical auditions. "You're imposing costs on A.," I overheard one say. They were probably joking around. Perhaps that makes it even weirder.
I'm over the weirdness now. I've learned what public goods and social costs are. I no longer wink into I-feel-stupid panic mode when the classroom discussion moves into economics territory. But I did, for a long time. And it was not fun. Nothing compounds a transfer student's sense of unworthiness like having everyone around you be fluent in a language that nobody ever spoke in your linguistics major.
So I would concur with Prof. Burgess-Jackson to the extent that everyone should read a lot, think even more, and take a class in logic. But I'd add that whatever you major in, you'll be better off in the long term taking an intro course in microeconomics as well. Particularly if you wind up at this law school.
And now it's spring break.
In the past two weeks, while I was busy submitting to the crush of the exam-season vise, the seasons changed. Almost without my noticing. Now I look outside and not only is all the snow gone, but the residual charcoal-gray layer of salt has been street-swept and rain-washed away. The waterfront is completely thawed. The first boat has reappeared in the long-empty harbor. In California, this would be spring.
"What season is it?" I asked T. as we sat down to our last Con Law class, a week ago.
She did a double take. "What do you mean, what season is it? Is this a trick question?" (Apparently, 'tis the season to be overly suspicious of hidden issues in any question posed to you. Blame the exam-givers.)
"No...I'm just wondering...because it doesn't seem to be winter any more, but it's not yet spring."
"Sure it's spring!"
"Nothing's growing yet."
"Then it's winter still!" T. was having no truck with metaphysics on this particular Friday morning.
I joke that we had three seasons in California: spring, summer and rain. Here, it seems we have five. I've seen summer, I've seen autumn, I've seen winter, and I presume that spring will arrive within the next month or so. But right now, it's an interstitial season, wing or sprinter; mid-forties, sunny, windy, and dry. The yellowed grass and bare trees in the park are perplexed: is it time to bud yet? Eh? Is it? Then the nighttime temperature drops back below freezing and they collectively shrug.
One thing is for sure: it's no longer exam season. My post-exam ritual, once an elaborate thing, has now been pared back to three small gestures: adding the casebook to the Sell-Back pile, recycling all the practice exams, and dropping the outline into the plastic bag where I now store old outlines ever since they outgrew any of the binders I own. Depositing my Patent Law outline last night meant that exams, such as they were, were officially over. For another two months at least.
Now for everything else on the to-do list that's been idling for weeks. I'm done with Tax; it's time to do my taxes.
Tax is done.
No time to blog.
Patent Law tomorrow.
Thanks for the waves; I rode them. And I haven't passed out from exhaustion yet, so it's all good.
(It's funny how these exams, stressful as they are, still haven't registered in my mind as the actual endpoints of the classes I took this term. I'm going to come back from spring break and not be taking Tax any more. That's just weird.)
Onward!
Three exams in four days is a BAD THING.
And when the two consecutive exams are Tax and Patent Law, tomorrow and Saturday, that's even worse.
I'm done with Equal Protection!
I'm thrilled to be done with Equal Protection. Wondrous though the professor was -- and he truly was, I'd gladly take as many other classes with him as I could -- this was just, from start to finish, Not My Thing. But I did it. And it's done. And now it will no longer mystify me when I hear people talking about things like strict scrutiny and narrow tailoring. And I've got a cute flowchart that might even serve me on the bar exam. And did I mention it's done?
Exam: check. A weird one, it was. I've never had such a long, unfactful, theory-inclined question count for so much on a law exam before. But the good thing about a question like this is...
...hang on, I'm sure there's a good thing about it...
...ah yes, the good thing about it is that you can't possibly kick yourself for having missed anything since you're so completely bewildered by what the question was asking in the first place. That would make this the first law exam from which I've managed to walk away without second-guessing my answer. Although I bet if I could, I would.
(Equally bewildering: why La Campanella lodged itself in my head midway through the question. Not the first time that phantom music has visited me during an exam, but still an omen I can't quite decipher.)
Then again, maybe I still haven't really shifted into exam mode. Did I really take a Con Law exam today? Do I really have a Tax exam on Friday, and one in Patent Law on Saturday? These certainly don't seem real. Maybe this wasn't real either. Maybe I'll wake up next week and...find myself in Florida working on my paper.
Thanks to all who sent waves; they were well-received, even here in the far boondocks of the state of denial!
As with many things at my law school, our highly granularized sequence of Constitutional Law courses is both a godsend and the bane of my courseload.
The exam I'm taking tomorrow (!?!?!!!), for example, will conclude a class called Constitutional Law III: Equal Protection and Substantive Due Process. Con Law III features a few of the best cases from Jeremy's classic satire, but fails to mention far more. Those, I guess, will come up in Con Law I: Government Structure. Or maybe Con Law IV: Speech and Religion. Or, if you just can't imagine cramming both freedom of speech and the Establishment Clause into a single term, Con Law II: Speech and Con Law V: Religion. Not to mention all the seminars and independent studies on unenumerated constitutional rights and advanced constitutional theory and [adjective] constitutional [noun] as far as your imagination extends.
I was advised, during a formative phase in my law school career, to take lots of Bar Courses. These are the subjects on which I will eventually be tested as a victim of the California (and potentially other states TBD) bar exam. Now I've got a little JCA-shaped angel on my right shoulder, mewling in my ear that I should take a great deal of Con Law. If not because it represents the heart, soul and spleen of the American legal system, then at least because it's going to be on the bar exam and I'd rather take my time and learn it properly than slam it in a BarBRI class.
At this law school, this means at least three Con Law courses to ensure that all your bar-exam bases are covered. Godsend: for people who like Con Law, you can do that plus a whole lot more. Bane: I am not one of those people.
I will be indescribably glad, come about five o'clock tomorrow, when my Con Law exam is over and I can slip back into blissful nonconfrontation with the Fourteenth Amendment. But between now and then, I've got a load of flowcharts to make. *sigh*...at least they'll be useful for bar review too. I hope.
Last year I drank a great deal of green tea. I'd take it in pretty much any form, but my favorite flavor was unquestionably the super-juiced version from Yogi Tea. I'd grab a cup first thing in the morning, and by the end of Civ Pro I could feel the antioxidants dancing through my bloodstream like so many bits of glitter. That yogi knows his chi.
I hadn't had any Yogi Tea for months without realizing how much I missed it. Then I happened upon the stuff yesterday at Trader Joe's, and couldn't resist. It is exam season, after all, whether or not my brain is willing to admit it, and I need all the process-boosting vitamins I can get. (Perhaps it's a good thing that I ran out of Stoli Vanil last night. But I'd argue that it too contains process-boosting vitamins of a sort.)
Today I made myself a cup as I played around with a Visio grid of the major patent act provisions. Amidst the lovely snarl of 102(g)(2) priority rules, I noticed that the tag on the tea bag bore a fortune: "Whatever you do today will be the most beautiful."
That's one beautiful statute grid, I guess.
Con Law outline is DONE.
Tax outline is done.
Patent Law outline is done.
Con Law final exam is on Wednesday afternoon.
Tax final exam is on Friday afternoon.
Patent Law final exam is on Saturday afternoon.
Despite my recent outlining blitz, my subconscious has yet to fully register that these are actual final exams, the focus in fact of an entire term's worth of work. I still can't quite imagine how such a thing could be happening in the second week of March.
Some isolated synapses have begun firing, though. Last night I dreamed that I was taking my Tax exam: it was in my former Trademarks classroom, and Professor Tax himself was proctoring it. I, meanwhile, was cleaning out my pullman, finding everything in there from CDs to a chainmail shirt (N.B. I do not own one of these in real life). You should be working on that Tax exam, my conscience needled me, but I ignored it -- until I saw people start handing in their answers. Then I spooked. And woke up.
"Sounds like a regular pre-exam anxiety dream," said my husband.
"Except I haven't had any anxiety yet," I said. "I think this means I need some."
Ambient music: overture to The Barber of Seville.
Professor Con Law is very, very well-liked at my law school. The second I blog anything about him that could be misinterpreted, I'm sure the readers at my school (at least one of whom I know is in his class with me) will potentially come down hard on me for sniping at a local favorite son.
I like him myself, actually. He's a deft leader of discussions, unthreateningly calling on people and then neatly rephrasing whatever they said into a brilliant answer that everyone else struggles to record verbatim. I was warned early on that he was into white guilt, but not once in the course did I catch a whiff of the self-flagellation so prevalent among my cohorts last year. The week we spent on the Michigan cases was painful, but even then, the discussion never actually went over the anti-Man waterfall. Other than that week, though, I spent most of the class almost blissfully unmoved.
But now I wonder. I'm reading things in my notes that were obviously transcribed verbatim, pearls fallen from the lips of Prof. Con Law, and they're surprisingly unequivocal. "NAACP’s campaign to eradicate segregation in the south = most important legal event of 20th cen." reads one passage, which goes on to elaborate how the aforementioned campaign inspired the notion of interest-group legal activism almost from scratch. Most important, he said. Tap-tap-tap go the keyboards; duly noted.
Look, we're all grownups here. You give me a job to do and I'll do it. And in this case, my job is not to care about what you say, but to learn it, to craft from it the exam response that will best please you and therefore best serve me. The number that comes back on my exam is far more important, in the scope of my ongoing life, than the way I'm certain my intestines would contort if I shifted out of autopilot mode and attempted to internalize my stenography in real time. "Why did SCOTUS take so long to name diversity as compelling interest?" you wondered. I wrote it down. These are your thoughts. Yours. You will be testing me on these, and I must know them.
Perhaps this is the magic of Professor Con Law: with the aforementioned exception of Michigan Week, replete with antacids and lousy moods for the rest of the day, intestinal contortions were not a problem for me in this class. It's almost as though he spoke with the Voice of Saruman, taking all of this absurd law I'd read and turning it into an almost hypnotically sane, considered, comfortable discussion. I could write down things that would, outside this room, upset me beyond the point of intelligibility...and remain unaffected. Like diving under waves.
It's a shame that he appears to teach only the subjects to which I have a visceral aversion. Imagine having him for a class I actually liked.
Con Law outline is slow going. At least it's going at all. The law itself isn't that extensive -- equal protection only takes up maybe a dozen pages in my Gilberts -- and yet somehow I've managed to fill 42 pages with dutiful class notes.
With so little law at stake, what the hell did we talk about for nine weeks?
If I'd been in this position a year ago, I'd have been in tears, adrift in a storm of policy with precious few footholds of actual black-letter law. But that was then, this is now, this is a school where I no longer must fear policy, and the Fourteenth Amendment *will* be my bitch by the end of this weekend.
Wouldn't it be neat to walk into an exam like this one? Not that I know enough about basketball to pass it...
Pay attention.
Falling asleep on the living room couch is not the same thing as outlining Con Law.
Taking four hours to catch up on three days' worth of Tax notes to keep the otherwise-complete Tax outline perfectly current is not the same thing as outlining Con Law.
Making pad thai for dinner is not the same thing as outlining Con Law, no matter how much tofu you throw in.
Instant-messaging with stepmother is not the same thing as outlining Con Law.
Doing dishes and laundry is not the same thing as outlining Con Law.
Glancing at the clock and deciding to spend the rest of the evening attempting to catch up on your Con Law reading is not the same thing as outlining Con Law.
No matter if pondering the Fourteenth Amendment is about as attractive as an enema right about now. It's not going to get any better. Now end this blog post and go -- no, don't go do something productive, go outline Con Law.
[continues to guilt self]
I spent Sunday pulling my long-belabored write-on short proposal together, doing a cursory citation check (my circuit split has now broadened to four circuits, two of one mind, two of another), and getting it into the hands of the write-on editor. Yeehaw!
Pending his approval, I move to Phase II: the ten-page long proposal. This will apparently need to happen by the end of exams, a.k.a. a week from Friday (yolp!) because I waited so damn long to file the proposal and the final deadline (3/31) is now fast approaching. But this is a course of action to which I've already committed, and I can't blow it for procrastination. I made my bed and hereby resolve to lie in it.
One major item crossed off the ever persistent To-Do List, at any rate.
Today I gave a quick PowerPoint presentation on the topic to my E-Commerce seminarmates. My note, in one form or another, is also going to be my final paper for the seminar (which has a far more generous deadline of 7/1). Since I'm doing the long-paper option in the seminar, the in-class presentation was optional. But this may represent the first and last time I ever have an opportunity to do extra-credit work in law school, and I'm still too covetous of decent grades to pass it up. Plus, an evening spent making pretty pictures in PowerPoint beats an evening spent outlining Con Law any day of the week.
So that was all good and productive. But it also should have represented closure, and yet it doesn't. I still haven't mentally registered that E-Commerce, the darling of my quarterly schedule, is now over. It's done. The entire quarter ends this Friday, exams start the following Wednesday, and none of this is sticking in my brain-pan no matter how many times I repeat it to myself. I have two more classes in each of Tax, Patent Law and Con Law and that's it.
Listen. Listen, you glazed-over contented silly person. You have an exam a week from tomorrow in Equal Protection and you have no outline. You need to make one. NOW. Stop doing things like blogging and chilling out and spending time with your husband and GET TO WORK.
[But I've been working! I did my write-on proposal and my e-commerce presentation and--]
GET TO WORK! NOW!
[it could be worse...at least I'm basically caught up in Tax and Patent Law...]
NOW!
Sometimes I love the quarter system at my law school. You've got so many more options in a school with quarters. Where else can a transfer student profit from six full academic terms? Quarters mean that I can nail all the bar courses, complete the entire intellectual property sequence, and still have time for random fun like "The Legal History of Early China" (no kidding, it's an actual class here).
But more often, quarters bug the hell out of me. Nine weeks is short. Theoretically you can fit an entire law school course into nine weeks, particularly if it meets four times a week like Tax, but round about Week Seven everything lurches into scramble mode. Otherwise-discursive professors suddenly downshift and take the entire hour to lecture you on all the stuff they'd been meaning to cover before the end of the syllabus. You'll glance at the calendar and realize, without actually grasping the enormity of this, that you've got your first final a week from Wednesday.
[double take]
This would probably be a good time to start my Con Law outline.
It's also time to register for spring-term classes, which start immediately after spring break, right at the end of March. Easier to think about a new rash of classes than to dwell on the fact that I'm about to have three exams in four days in less than two weeks, and then spend spring break wasting another trip to Florida on my write-on/e-commerce paper. Yes. Right. Next term! Bring it on!
Ironically, nearly all of my anticipated courseload next term is lifted straight from my preregistered courseload last fall, back at my old law school. I'll have Evidence and Con Law I (the class I'm taking now is Con Law III; there are five total; go figure), as well as, if the lottery favors me, an ethics seminar. The weather will probably be similar to spring in California, too. If I can coax another few months of useful life out of my pullman bag -- which is getting sadly rickety; winter has not been its friend -- it might almost be as though I'd never transferred.
Except that it won't. My fourth class is Copyright, something that I was never quite able to fit into my projected schedule at my ex-law school. I'll be taking finals over Memorial Day when my cohorts are already starting their summer gigs. At some point I'm going to have to figure out summer housing, how much stuff to move, whether to sublet our apartment to one of the nearby law firms in search of summer associate accommodations, whether to drive to California in the A4 or fly out and hope the two of us can manage sharing the Honda. Life will never be so simple as if I'd never transferred. But I'm not asking for it to be. As tough as an overcommitted winter with a discontented telecommuting husband has been at times, I'm still glad I made the switch.
Shame about the pullman, though. It's become a personal icon of mine: "There's JCA with her rolly bag." But the wheels rattle so offensively that I can no longer tow the bag in the library, the ball-bearing wells are crusted with orange rust, and the telescoping handle refuses to telescope roughly half the time. Since I drive to school now, I really don't have much excuse to continue walking the dog anyway. Maybe that'll be my final moment of passage: not on-campus interviewing, or taking exams, or doing the law school musical, but retiring the last trapping of my original incarnation as a commuter student.
I think I'll wait on that as long as I can. Far from being something I'd rather shove under the rug, my transfer-student origins have become a point of pride for me here. Even if nobody else understands why I continue to drag around a cranky falling-apart badge of my own nerdity, I do. That is the bookbag of someone who spent exam nights praying next to the clanking old radiator in a strange hotel, who fended off panhandlers on urine-scented streets, who took the sunrise train and studied in the single-file seats and armwrestled with personal demons. And I don't think I'm ready to give that up just yet.
Twice so far this term, Professor Tax has walked out on our class.
The first time was almost understandable: he had called on a half-dozen people in succession, none of whom were present in class that day. "Well then," he said crisply, packing up his notepad and statutory supplement and trademark bell into a neat stack. "I will leave you to the Davis rule, and we will resume our discussion on Monday." Twenty minutes remained in the class period; those of us who *had* shown up to class spent at least five of those minutes blinking stupidly and shrugging at each other, wondering what had just happened.
Today, he left again, under rather different circumstances: early on in the class, just as he was beginning to discuss the assignment of income from property, he cupped his hand over his nose and mouth and paused.
"I must apologize," he said, regarding the palm of his cupped hand. "I'm having a terrible nosebleed."
And he packed up his notepad, statutory supplement, and trademark bell into a neat stack, while the blood ran down his face.
I thought: somebody ought to offer the poor guy a Kleenex.
Then I thought: stupid, of course I've got a packet of them in my bag to help me nurse this cold.
But I wasn't quick enough on the draw; K. sprang up out of her seat a moment later, handing him the last tissue in her own packet and ending the awkward moment wherein the rest of the class wondered what would happen next.
He left.
Five minutes had elapsed since the beginning of the class.
I wonder if we're going to have a makeup class, or if everyone will pretend as though this never happened.
