I am not even sure what to do with myself.  I used to get up at 6:30, shack down a coffee, maybe a english muffin, and sprint to school.  I used to drive 20 minutes north, get to school, grab a study room, and prepare for my day.  I used to read all day long and would eat a PB&J with a granola bar each lunch.  I used to stay until 6 or 7pm and then come home only to eat and get ready to do it all over again.

Those are the things I used to do.  Now I sleep late, watch movies, go to the gym, and sit on the couch.  Now I do a do a little work here and there and leisure read a little here and there.  Who would ever go to law school you may ask?  I could not be more bored and for as weird as it sounds, I know after New Year’s hangover subsides I will be begging to get back to the grind.  It is weird, but its routine, its new, its different, its law school.

Saturday mornings have always been my most revered part of the week.  Growing up it was the time to start planning backyard football games or the time to lie around and watch cartoons.  In college, it was the time to meet up with friends in the dining hall to recount the previous night’s ordeal.  Best described, Saturday mornings used to be good ol’ down time.

As with many aspects of life, law school threw a bit of a curveball at what was once wasted time.  It is the middle of November now, we have been given our first drafts of the memo back, and finals are just around the corner.  To be polite, time isn’t exactly “ours” anymore.  The funniest part is, I don’t really mind and it seems as if my other classmates are right there with me.

Today I sit at a kitchen table at my family’s house on the Cape because it was vacant and I needed to get away from school for a little bit.  I have my Civil Procedure book to my right, Torts book to my left, five different colored highlighters in front of me, and my Torts outline on my desktop.  This no longer seems strange to me, this seems regular, and as a model of efficiency (minus the procrastination of writing this particular entry) the work is moving along nicely.

The one thing I have learned from law school is that it is not that hard, well not that hard if you treat it properly.  That is not to say you need abandon your social life, although my best friend from home is starting to wonder if I’ve moved to Chechnya and it is not to say that you can’t go out on the town.  The take away message is that the way you treat your “free” time will greatly determine what type of student you will be.  Thus a rainy Saturday morning that would have been spent on the couch watching every perceivable college football game that extended cable offers, is now spent going over cases and outlining the various facets of Tort law.  It does in a sense feel like it will never end, but Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and we are roughly one month away from winter break.  Where has it gone?

3 Years of Trouble

I feel as if my last 5 or 6 straight entries have been predicated on the fact that it had been a long period of time since the preceding entry.  This is not one of those entries.  I must acknowledge that it has been a couple of weeks, but not for lacking of time in which to write.  To be honest, law school does provide one with more time than your overworked lawyer uncle, underappreciated law school advisor, or overly stress inducing pre-law professor would have you think.  To be honest, life hasn’t really changed all that much, it has just changed entirely.

I wake up earlier, I actually eat breakfast (yes I know, I was a bit confused about that early meal people kept talking about, surprisingly just about everything on toast is delicious).  After those two events that were non-existent in my previous life (yes, I believe in reincarnation as I died on August 18th and was reincarnated as an overworked and underappreciated law student).  I have since spent entirely too much of my entirely too slim budget on coffee during the day and beer at night.  Actually, that carried over from undergraduate life.

Otherwise, I spend my time in a single building between the hours of 8am and 5pm and take a bit of work home every night.  This used to be tedious work.  I was not really sure what anyone was looking for and I certainly was not sure what I was getting out of all of this.  That has since changed.  Cases read like Harry Potter books and when you can find a bit of humor in a case about burglary and attempted rape (even if you know nothing about the law, you should still look up Regina v. Curran, its like a Dane Cook story, only funny).

I have found myself neglecting all of my friends from home, of which I am not even sure I have anymore.  I have found scarce time for my good friends from BU and I do not see much of a reprieve in the near future.  Family, well they have been neglected as well.  Surprisingly, people don’t seem to mind so much, a sense of pride or other seems to placate any ill feelings and everyone is generally interested in what it is like and how I am getting along (I have learned to keep law school stories to a minimum as the things we find funny/interesting are certainly not the things that real humans do).

I would like to say that I will be more active on this blog in the near future but as you and I both know that is not going to happen.  We will see.  R.I.P. Ziggy.

Its official, I have survived the first month of law school.  Intact.  The horror stories are not true.  Don’t get me wrong, it is not easy in any means and my life style has completely changed to accommodate the new schedule.  However, it is completely different than undergraduate classes.  Each class has you on the edge of your seat, both because they are interesting and there is a bit of nervousness inherent with a class where at any moment you can be called on and asked to perform.

Law school has made many fear hearing their last names.  Mr. Grimes, can you explain the reasoning of the court in granting a motion for summary judgment.  Um… crap.  Just keeping up on the game will not get it done, you have to get ahead and rework what you have already learned.  One month down, many more to go.

I can’t think of a more apt title than a reference to World War II.  The Allied forces counted the days running up to D-Day and referred to those after it as D-Day plus how ever many days followed.  September 18th was my personal D-Day, well perhaps with less bloodshed and loud noises.  The day signified the first day I set foot on the law school beaches and it has been a pressing journey ever since.  Unlike the real D-Day, my pill boxes and defensive tank formations have not really been that overwhelming.  To be honest, the workload is actually pretty enjoyable.

Don’t get me wrong, I have never worked this hard in my life (I don’t think) and I am certainly not someone who avoids hard work.  I wake up early and I fall asleep exhausted earlier than I have fallen asleep in my life barring the days when I had a curfew and I went to school with a plastic lunchbox.

In a lot of ways law school is a mix between a 90 hour work week in a law firm and a 1st grade classroom.  The workload is full but we keep our books in cubbies.  We wake up early and persist solely on coffee but we take all of our classes with the exact same people.  We read cases about murder and rape but I write with 5 different highlighter colors in each of my books.

I have certainly grown up a lot maturity wise to be able to handle the new course load but come weekend it is right back to the same fun and excitement that memorialized our childhoods.  Maybe it is all fun and games as long as you are responsible about it.  Maybe.

So far, so good.

Today, I woke up at 6am, went for a run and then headed off to class.  Let’s just say this process is nothing like being an undergraduate.  The case being that I arrived at around 8:15 this morning for a 12pm Legal Methods class.  If this was undergraduate scheduling I would have shown up at 8:15 for an 8am class.

I am not sure I am entirely prepared for the amount of work I will be doing for at least the next year, but so far so good.  I am ahead of the game and I seem to be absorbing this material in a sense and am prepared for each class.  Enough so that I am not nervous to be called on and at times I am even jumping into discussions to get the right answer across.  Don’t get me wrong, I will get burned at some point.  Everyone does.  But today was not that day and tomorrow does not look good either.  Here’s to getting it done.

I feel like I have been in a haze.  In the past month I think I have only posted one other time.  It isn’t that I have been away from a computer in some remote area of the world.  And its certainly not that I have nothing really to say.  To be honest this past month I have done and seen just a little bit of everything adding up to some pretty wild times.  I think thats just it though.

I haven’t been thinking about this blog at all.  Not in the slightest.  I won’t use today to recap the past month of activity instead lets just leave the last month as some enigma.  4 weeks until my first day of orientation and I feel like it might as well already be here.  I have the next 4 weeks of my life planned out to various parties or the arrival of friends and so many other things that I really feel like this summer has culminated and passed with just about a month left.  What a weird summer it has been.

So in any sense lets treat this as an apology and keep up because big things to come.