Sidelined

I love to run. For roughly the last 8 years it has been not only a mainstay of my fitness routine, but also a perfect and sane way to burn off the excess stress that always seems to pile up in my life. I can usually track the intensity of my life by my compulsive need to throw on my running shoes and hit the pavement. The month before finals is a good time to start clocking miles. Two weeks ago I bought a treadmill, which is quite possibly the most exciting purchase ever for a runner who lives in a rainy climate. I've been wanting a treadmill for some time, and finally I was able to afford one. And it's glorious. However, fate seems determined to not only rain on my parade, but also to crush all the floats, as I have managed to do some very unfortunate damage to my left knee. Over the course of my life I have been a dancer, a missionary, and a runner; all endeavors that caused my knees to do some hard core popping, but never anything serious. As a missionary my mantra was that if I could get out of bed, I could tract, and only when I was unable to walk would I call for a sick day. It didn't ever come to that, and when I came home, my knees toughened right back up. About two months ago I spent three consecutive days wearing the most uncomfortable pair of high heels imaginable because they just looked so good with my trial competition suit. Over the course of those three days, I started noticing a persistent, dull ache in my knees, which unfortunately did not go away when I changed back into my standard jeans and tennis shoes. A week later the pain was still cramping my style, so I decided to lay off the gym for a while to get over it. When I got my treadmill, I was sure that I would be ready to run again because nearly two months had passed since the offending incident, so I went for it. The first day my knee hurt like crazy, so I took a day in between to rest up. The second time was slightly better. The pain was noticeable, but not unbearable, so I figured I could run through it. That was pretty much the story all last week. Fast forward to yesterday. My knee started to bother me almost immediately, but I didn't pay attention. I was two miles into my run when I felt my knee twist suddenly and that dull persistent ache turned into something vaguely resembling a sledgehammer attack. My knee completely locked up and I think I'm left with no other option but to limp off to the sidelines for a while. This is utterly ridiculous, but I'm fairly certain my body is starting to fall apart. I wonder if there is strict products liability for manufacturing defects in the human body, because at this point I really wish I could sue someone to put me back in my rightful, runworthy position.

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes and quarterlife realizations

The sky is a bizarre color right now. I'm not sure what to make of it. It's neither slate nor ashen...not even black. I think the right word is blue, but that just doesn't seem right. In February in Oregon, the sky should always be some variation on rainy. There's a tree outside the law school building that I noticed today on my way home. It stood out to me because it's rapidly turning pink. Could it be that winter is actually loosening its death grip on the land? It's a possibility. Time marches on. I came home today and actually had some extra time, which I fully intended to devote to studying for the MPRE. Instead I found myself reading a book of letters my dad had compiled for me of our correspondence while I was in Spain. It was a good opportunity for me to reflect on life. It's so full of ups and downs and quite often it just passes by while we're busy doing whatever it is we do. I've already mentioned before that my life has been somewhat of an exercise in survival mode recently. The fact is that I've been that way for about two years now. I'm so focused on surviving law school that everything else has taken a backseat. My theory is that I can get on with life once I cross this minor endeavor off of my "to do list." I know there is much to look forward to, not just after I graduate, but even now as I press on in my schooling. But sometimes I wish I could hit rewind and take life in reverse for a while. I miss being a missionary and having the clarity and perspective that comes with knowing exactly what your purpose is. I miss being an intern, with the self imposed sense of accomplishment that came with working in an important sounding job in the nation's capital. I miss summers at home with new friends and old, having random adventures at pointless jobs. I miss being a crazy, irresponsible, and sleep deprived college freshman, having all the fun random adventures that one can only have while living away from home for the first time. I'm absolutely positive this post has no point whatsoever. I think it's just that I've had a lot of wonderful experiences in my life and I've done pretty much everything I've set out to do, with law school being one of the last major stragglers on that to do list. It is by far the most grown up endeavor I've undertaken and by far the least fun. I think my point is I've really had a blast getting to where I am, but if law school is the tip of the adulthood ice burg, I don't think I really want to grow up.

Everything I needed to know about law school I learned from teaching primary...

For the last month, in addition to my work and school commitments, I've also been teaching a primary class at church, which consists of four and five year olds. There are 9 kids in my class. Every week for two hours on Sunday, I shelf my intelligence and play babysitter to a very precocious bunch. I think the title of "primary teacher" is a misnomer, because I really don't teach. It's quite impossible to teach children that small because they're impulsive, talkative, energetic, and unrestrained by social inhibitions that can only come with time. So my time in primary is spent talking in my "grown-up voice," struggling to keep the children in their chairs and encouraging them to raise their hand when they have something to say. This is of course completely pointless because once one person says something, seven other tiny voices chime in with variations on the exact same statement. It's quite possibly the most exhausting two hours of my week.
I had to teach a class yesterday on juvenile crime in the context of international children's rights. Before you point out the obvious, I know what you're thinking: "Children have rights?" In theory they do. And this particular class is a theory class. Anyway, as part of the grade in that class, everyone has to teach at least once. I think now would be a good time to voice my opposition to paying tuition for professors who foist the teaching responsibilities off on students. But that's not really the reason for this post. My International Children's Rights class consists of about 19 2Ls and 3Ls, and I have to say, by the time you reach the upper echelons of professional training, you expect maturity to be the order of the day. And you would be wrong in that expectation. Very wrong. As I watched the class take the sidenote topic of media restraint and run it into territory completely uncontemplated by the lesson plan, I was overwhelmingly reminded of what it's like trying to teach 5 year olds. One inane comment inevitably leads to a barrage of equally tangential arguments, everyone tries to talk at once, no one listens, and by the time you actually manage to get the class focused back on you and the lesson, 20 minutes have passed and the original message has gotten completely lost in the interim. Perhaps we should spend less time focusing on the finer points of whether or not juvenile criminals should be waived into the adult system and a little more time covering the basics of raising your hand when you want to say something, and even more time reminding people that what they may want to say probably will make everyone else dumber for having heard it, so speak with discretion.

Midpoint malaise and survival mode auto pilot

It's nearly two months into the new semester. This semester started out with quite a bit of promise; my grades fall semester were the highest yet, I even managed to write a high paper in one class...the one I was sure I failed. Go figure. It reminds me of my undergraduate paper theory, how grades are inversely proportionate to effort and crappy papers are always ahead of the curve. Of course starting a new semester means starting from square one. Painfully lame. And in the brief time I've been back, I managed to take on way more than I would ever care to handle in an entire year. I think my rationale was that if I got all my extraneous activities out of the way in the first two months of the semester, I'd have time to get caught up during the last two months. What was I thinking? Last month it was a mock trial competition, this month it's an appellate competition, writing an appellate brief, teaching a two hour seminar class on children and crime, and studying for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam. Next month I have to take the MPRE, write my third year paper (I know, I'm only a second year, but I'm taking the class now, so I have to write the paper), and judge rounds in the First Year Appellate Competition. I sat down with my schedule and tried to decide when I would have time to start my outlines and the next opening in my schedule is spring break in March. Two weeks after that are finals and then the year is over. I'm up on the downside, and the law school experience is once again changing shape. The first semester was an adventure: everything was new and exciting, and even though it was a little scary, I was "living the dream" which made it all worth it. The second semester I felt my attention span begin to falter. Classes dragged, my incidence of solitaire playing went up, and I found it hard to really get into any of the subject material. Third semester was drudgery. With school and work, I had zero free time and even less motivation to press on. And here we are, in semester four, and I find myself just going through the motions, nothing more, nothing less. School is no longer fun, new, exciting, or even scary. It's just today, tomorrow, the end of the week. Survival mode is no way to live, but this isn't really life. This is just one more year.

Is that your final answer?

There are times that I worry about losing my skills as a writer. At no time is this fear more pronounced than during finals. During my 4 year stint as an undergrad, I wrote just shy of a bazillion research papers. Seriously, a bazillion. And my dirty little secret is that I liked it...scratch that, I loved it. Oh sure, I was sure to complain about the long hours in the library and the late nights combing a thesaurus in hopes of never having to use the same adjective twice, but when I had a finished paper, smooth and eloquent with just the right touch of sarcastic wit, I relished putting my name on it and handing it in. In my vast experience as a law student, I have written an appellate brief and a legal memo. That's it. And let me tell you, there is no joy in writing a legal memo, especially when the bulk of it is consumed by case citations and repetition repetition repetition of the same contentions and evidence. When finals roll around, I almost get excited about the opportunity to do a little writing...almost. Law school exams are most succinctly described as mental bulimia. Word vomit at its finest. I just took exam 4 of 5 this morning and if actual bulimia trashes your esophagus, it probably safe to say that mental bulimia is doing the same to my brain. I can actually feel the synapses melting into one big short-circuiting mass. Which brings me back to my original fear of becoming a mediocre academic writer for lack of practice and mental reconditioning. This morning as I was frantically heaving the contents of my brain onto paper, racing against the clock to answer four hypotheticals in two hours, I took a moment to go back and reread my answers for coherence and concluded that a reasonably intelligent fourth grader, armed with the Model Code of Professional Responsibility could have written what I did, and probably with fewer spelling errors as well. Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion, Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion, Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion and so on and so forth forever and ever amen. No style, no flair, no spark of imagination needed here. I've been told legal writing is highly technical and concise. I think that's code for boring, simple, and repetitive. I think if the powers that be want to mold "better" attorneys, whatever that is, a college degree should not be a prerequisite to law school admission. After all, they spend the first semester teaching you to forget everything you ever learned up until that point anyway. And now this is really just turning into a rant, so I suppose I'll give it a rest and start studying for my constitutional law exam. After all, I'm just dying to see how many different ways there are to say the exact same thing over and over again.

Raise your hand if...

The semester is drawing rapidly to a close, but evidently that's no reason to think I would possibly be off the hook in class. It's hard to differentiate among 5 classes that I hate and pick the one that annoys me the most, but today the winner is Business Organizations. I've never been called on in that class. There are about 80 students in there, which is assurance enough, but even better is the fact the professor seems to enjoy hearing his own voice rather than the insights of students, which I suppose is probably wisdom on his part. If we knew what he knows about corporations, he'd be out of a job, which means what we do know about corporations is limited, speculative, and often nonsensical, and honestly, who want to subject themselves to that? Since this particular professor favors the lecture method to the Socratic, I find myself, on a regular basis, struggling to pay attention in class, secure in the knowledge that I've done the reading, but he'll never call on me. My attention span has fallen sharply in the past few weeks, probably because of the inordinate amount of time I find myself spending on campus as finals approach. The topic for the day was shareholder derivative actions and evidently the professor was feeling adventurous enough to toss a question into the crowd in hopes of eliciting the awkward dialogue that is the substance of a law school class. The query bounced around the room like a beachball at a concert as people ducked the question either because they were unprepared or too smart to be sucked into the trap. Then I heard it. The sound that still makes my skin crawl. The sound of my own name...being butchered as usual. The case we were reading happened to be taken from a supplement to our casebook which can be found on the internet. Ahh, the internet, great facilitator of learning and repository of casebook supplements. Surely, since I was on the internet, I had the supplement open, right? I looked to my computer screen hoping to find something, anything useful to blurt out as I briefly entertained the idea of copping out as well. My screen was crowded with three open chat windows, the front page of the Times online, an email conversation with fellow classmate, and a solitaire game in progress, but of course the casebook supplement was nowhere to be found. I suppose you can say I've raised boredom to an art form, which did nothing for me on this particular occasion. I pulled up a sadly incomplete case brief I had written the day before when I actually did the reading, and start throwing answers at the wall, hoping to see some of them stick. When I ran out of semi-intelligent things to say, another question came, as they always do, and this time I reverted to my personal favorite: the pensive and silent stare. I really was trying to come up with a good answer, but I knew that if I thought quietly enough, some other attention-craving opportunist would start waving his or her hand frantically, just dying for the chance to dazzle the professor with an answer that would probably be long, verbose, and completely tangential, forcing the professor to spend several minutes getting the class back on task and causing him to forget entirely who he was initially talking to. This technique is tried and true, and worked for me today as it always does. Should I care that I'm not the one eagerly flailing my hand and jumping at the opportunity to contribute to class discussion? Probably. But why should I care when I'm content to coast? Coast on, my friends, coast on.

Stream of consciousness

I live in the library. It's true. I don't even know why I bother having an apartment, but I guess I need a place to store my non-essentials (ie: anything other than my laptop and books). I've been reading cases for the last 5 hours and I can tell that it's time to take a breather because my eyeballs are shaking, I have a headache, and my typing accuracy is hovering around 2%. I suppose blogging counts as that breather. It's been a pretty crazy semester, although I can't believe that finals are only two short weeks away. If you've been wondering what it's like, here's the elevator version...
I came to the conclusion that, having successfully survived the first year of law school without getting kicked out, having to repeat any classes, and basically alive and intact, I needed more of a challenge. I stacked my plate with 5 bar classes, held on to my job, and joined the Moot Court board. I knew after the very first day of school that I was so painfully audacious that it hurts me to even reflect on it. I think the only reason I'm still paddling away on this sinking ship is because I don't think about it. Classes have been insane. Anyone who tells you second year is better is lying through their teeth. It's not better, it's worse. Much much worse. Why is that? One word. Evidence. I thought my dignity had been effectively stripped last year, but I was wrong. Every day in Evidence is an exercise in looking moronic. My favorite line in that class has become "I'm sorry, I didn't hear the question." Maybe I really don't. The other dark abyss of my waking nightmare would be Business Organizations. Not only is the class positively soul sapping, but I sit next to a girl who is infected with tuberculosis and takes every opportunity she gets to cough right on me. Assigned seating: I can't knock it because it's how I met my spouse, but being next to Typhoid Mary has got to be a valid reason for a seat change, right? Sadly no. I find it somewhat disconcerting that I am counting down the days until the end of the semester, but at the same time, I have panic attacks while doing so. I think the only faint glimmer of hope is the fact that I'm halfway finished with law school. Halfway there. Try not to think about the bar.
Work has been an interesting addition to my madness this year, although if nothing else, I must say it has made me much more efficient with my time (right now doesn't count) because I know that if I don't get my reading done during the day, I can forget about having time to do it later because I'll be slaving away at my desk, doing my best to give other bloggers reasons to complain...http://www.oregoncatalyst.com/index.php?/archives/967-Help-Baby-Gabriel.html And moot court. Ahhh moot court. For some odd reason the executive board decided to put me in charge of organizing the first competition of the semester, nevermind the fact that I had absolutely no experience with such competitions and didn't know what the heck I was doing. Someone really dropped the ball there. It sucked up pretty much all of my September, I got to deal with lots of fun hate mail over my obvious inexperince in "running things" and all I can say is I'm glad that's over. Now I just have to worry about actually competing...yeah, I'll put that off until next semester....kind of like I've been putting off my reading about freedom of association...but now it's off to the last class of the day before my last day at work before the great and final push towards my two weeks of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of brain cells. 12-08-07...please come soon!!!