Sweet Valley Law

It is the conventional wisdom that law school is like high school. We have lockers, we have a student council, we even have a prom. Lately, however, I have started wondering whether law school is more like middle school.

Think about it: middle school is when you first discover that there is such a thing as innocence because POOF! it's already been lost. While most (not all) law students show up to 1L year savvier than their seventh-grade selves, there is something to be said about the brutality of the curve and the fierceness of its competition. I graduated from a university where it was possible to graduate without ever having taken a course for a grade; as long as you passed the requisite number of courses, then they slapped a baccalaureato on you. (In my case, in artibus.) Imagine my surprise, then, when I showed up to law school where an A- is, in fact, very different from an all-out A, and where I'm not the only one who cares about my grades. Innocence lost.

Middle school is also when I first discovered the destructiveness of gossip. People cower at the thought of dark alleys; I cower at the memory of the seventh-grade lunch table: fabricated rumors pitting friends against each other, alpha girls establishing who would be admitted to lunch that day. While I am fortunate not to attend a law school where students actively sabotage their classmates, I do recognize how quickly word spreads in a place where everybody knows everything. We talk about one another because that's a genuine way to bond in a small community. Mutual friends are common ground for people meeting for the first time. But sometimes I wonder whether it's too small a step from common ground to battleground. Never in law school have I ever been the victim of middle school-style guerilla gossip, but the proximity of law school gossip to guerilla gossip is just too close for my comfort.

(Which basically means, yeah, those girls did a doozy on me in eighth grade.)

Revamp

My readership (Hi, Ms. J! Hi, Munch!) recently has pointed out that I have lagged behind in posting. Mea culpa, but let me explain. When I first imagined this blog, I imagined it as a satirical look at the third year of law school. The postings themselves would be spontaneous and varied, but the opus as a whole would hang together by its strong thematic links.

So you see why I've lagged behind. There's not much else to say about 3L year other than: I have lots of free time. I'm not that motivated to work any more. I'm staring down the bar exam and imminent employment.

It's not a pretty picture. But there must be more than meets the eye, because well, there's always more. What this means is that I am taking this blog in a new direction. Rather than try to be so tragically hip ("I have so much free time"), I'm going to try to be honest. Anything is fair game, so my hoped-for thematic links might not be so obvious (read: not exist). But who knows, what results might even be funnier and more acerbic than what's preceded it.

New Day

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and my ear, nose, and throat passages are clear. The law revue came and went to much acclaim, and I've started to enjoy my swimming workouts now that I am no longer permitted on land.

It's amazing what a week off the normal routine will do to a person. Having to commit my evenings and weekends to the law revue was one thing, but having to commit my body to healing from a cold and from tendonitis? That's asking too much.

I'll take my monotony and routine anytime.

Law School Romance

Said the Captain to me, "You look better today - less like death warmed over."

Thanks.

Good grief

When it rains, it pours.

Last week, my doctor told me I had tendonitis in my right knee, and that the best way to heal it would be to walk on crutches. The very next day, I came down with a doozy of a head cold, which is still beating me up this very moment. Normally, my 3L tendencies (read: apathy, nonchalance) wouldn't have let these developments wear me down. But sometime last month I decided I needed to do something else with my time than, say, bake stuff.

So I signed up for my law school's annual musical, a small stage production that parodies law school and all its nonsense. I figured the extra activity and stimulation would preserve what little brain matter I still had that hadn't yet atrophied.

But then my knee decided to stop working, and my nose and throat decided to perform their own disgusting experiments. Apparently, my body objects to what little constructive activity there is in a law school stage production. So instead of having fun with silly activity, I'm stressing out that I won't be able to fulfill my acting responsibilities. Well, that backfired, didn't it.

And if being sick and crippled weren't enough, today the Captain's car broke down, too. He was on his way to my house with chicken soup. Talk about a road paved with good intentions.