HO-HO-Homework

Final exams are collectively, the grinch that steals Christmas for first year law students everywhere.


Instead of flying home with visions of sugar-plums dancing in my head, I am nailed to my desk with reams of outlines to study up on. Final exams are taken in January, so for nerds like me, it's impossible to celebrate until well after the New Year.

But it's really hard to study all day and I've not been entirely successful.

A day of "studying" really turns out to be just a day of watching bad day-time TV. I had no idea their were so many Court-TV shows out there. The People's Court, Judge Hatchett, Judge Judy, Moral Court, Texas Justice, Judge Matthison, etc.

I've had to turn off my internet too because once I get tired of watching bad tv, I end up surfing at my desk for a couple hours...and then checking the tv to see if anything better is on.

Desparate times call for desparate measures, so I've decided to do the most extreme and ruthless thing yet: to keep a log of how many hours I've actually studied. The results, ladies and gentlemen, were horrible.

In one entire day of "studying" I logged a whopping total of 3.5 hours! That's barely longer than a Peter Jackson movie! Pathetic. That was just two days ago.

Yesterday, I attempted to study better and logged an impressive 5.5 hours. Better, but still painfully short of a full day's work. Let's see how far I get today. I'm aiming for 6.

I'm a "survivor"!

There is an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Colby Donaldson (Contestant on the reality game-show, Survivor: Outback), gets in an argument with an old jewish man who was a survivor from the Holocaust, about who is more worthy of calling themselves a survivor.

The whole point was to make fun of the way people so easily refer to themselves as "survivors" even though they didn't survive anything seriously traumatic (like the Holocaust). Beyonce is a case in point.

Anyway, in that spirit, I would like to revel in some self-congratulatory thoughts by calling myself a survivor. Today was the last day of the semester and I'm happy to find that I've survived!

Hey, I earned that title. Law school was tough. I scarcely slept, I worked like a dog, I barely had contact with people, my classmates were all competing with each other, and all I had to eat for 3 months were Balance bars and coffee. Now that's suriviving! Let's see CBS make a reality show out of that!

Of course, finals are still looming ahead like a dark death-cloud... But after finals, I'll be a real survivor...of sorts.

On a scale of 1 to 10...

Today was the last day of class for Contracts and Civil Procedure.

I suppose I could write about the out-of-control hilarity that reigned free in the classrooms today and all the childish pranks we students played on our professors.

One crazy "frat" guy brought an amp and mic and proceeded to emcee during the entire class time, commenting and "shouting-out" like some kind of football spectator. Most of the silly things we did were inside jokes and it would just take too long to recount them and then explain why the heck they were so funny.

To some, like me, the end of Contracts marks the end of a long reign of terror and humiliation. Nothing has served to humble me more than being randomly called in class, answering like an idiot, and then having another classmate "help you out," as the professors euphemistically called it. The insult to injury comes, however, when the entire class shoots their hands up to "help you out."

At the end of each class today the profs gave us a little pep talk about our ensuing final exams. They said things like: Don't worry; grades don't matter; now is the time to stop defining yourself by a number. Prof H went so far as to suggest we never even look at the grades we get.

"Don't pick up your exam grades. Why should you? You did your best, and that's good enough. Who cares what you actually got? I never looked at my grades when I was in law school."

Just sitting here I am in disbelief that my first semester of law school is now nearing to a close. Before entering, I had heard a million and one urban legends about how "brutal" and "psycho" law school is. I had girded myself for the worse.

And was it that bad? Well...I have yet to take the finals. But so far, it wasn't that bad. Sure I never studied so long and hard in my life. Sure I got tired and burnt out near the end (or rather, middle). Sure I had no social life and gave up all hobbies. But it wasn't that bad.

I didn't have to give up TV or blogging. And as humbled as I was in class, I did understand most of the materials we were assigned. And I really liked my classmates and profs.

So all in all, it was a good experience. Challenging, stretching, painful, but good.

But I swear, if the semester had dragged on for another month...I would NOT be a happy camper. I couldn't have taken much more of this.

A funny thing happened on the way to integration...

I'm secretly proud that my study group is racially diverse. What can I say, I love a rainbow.

There's two white girls, three black girls, and an Asian girl, me.

Yesterday, Brittany, one of my black study-group girls, commented that she once met a white girl in grad school who said, "Brittany, you are the first black girl I've ever met!"

Brittany thought it was incredulous that someone in the US could go through her entire life, up until grad school, and never meet a black girl in the flesh.

And while my study group was having a good chuckle over that, I thought to myself, "Hey, wait a minute...I've never met a black girl in the flesh until this study group formed!"

I announced my revelation to the group and Brittany gave me a what-the-hell-look. "Where are you from?!" Brittany asked.

"San Jose, California," I replied, "where the population is atleast 50% Asian."

And then as I thought about it some more, I realized that I had only met one black man before, a friend from college. And as for black women, I met a lot of African women from Uganda, but not African-Americans. Very different.

During our discussion of my lack of racial experiences, Brittany happened to be checking her school email account and exclaimed, "What the hell! I just got an email for a 'White Christmas Party'! This school is so progressive it's going backwards!"

And after a moment's pause we all realized, it was 'white' because of the snow.

One of the things I love best about my school is meeting all kinds of people I would otherwise never have met. And I don't just mean race, I mean everything. People from all over the states, of all political persuasions (I met my first anarchist this year), and sexual orientations.