This Is Your Mind on Drugs, Any Questions?

Don't you ever feel like there are some days when everyone around you, including yourself, are on drugs? Where everything in the world just seems a little...off. The past 48 hours have felt like that. Examples:

-Contracts class with the ritalin-pushing Professor. 'Nuff said.
-A crazy man sitting within my and Chandana's personal bubble on the metro asks me if I'm from China or Taiwan. He then proceeds to tell the roommate and myself that he got into college because of his rich mother, he graduated with three degrees, and we can find him on Yahoo. There was also some mention of pennacillin. I don't know where that came from.
-After getting off the aforementioned metro ride, we hop onto the bus line that should take us to our friend's apartment, and we end up back at your own apartment. It was trippy/frustrating/funny all at the same time. Stupid DC metro bus system.
-My roommate and I walked through our front door without using our key. It was weird until we just realized our door was broken. Stupid door.
-Before getting the drugs (ok, 2 inhalers for the allergy induced asthma) that were actually prescribed to me, the pharmacist tries to make conversation by asking me what I do and indicating that he's only a month older. Using patient info to flirt = creepy.
-I felt like I was on crack today after having half a cup of coffee on an empty stomach before going to the pharmacy. I was so jittery that I cleaned my kitchen in 5 minutes.

Just when I was getting into a daily routine here and everything seemed normal, in came the weekend with a string of weird events. I blame it on Pluto being demoted from being a planet. It totally shook up the whole universe.

Bar Review

Recess is just so common place in the elementary school schedule, sometimes you don't even realize why it's there. It's to help kids release energy so that they can focus better in class. I remember reading in Newsweek about schools who were cutting out recess and they were having problems with their students and their attention spans.

If law school was like, well...school, Thursday nights would be our recess. While it is true that law students study a lot, they also set aside necessary time to unwind. I think it's great and funny that one of the student government's main responsibilities is coordinating weekly bar reviews. (USAC should learn from them). While I am not a hard drinker like a lot of my peers (wow, can they hammer it down), it's definitely a lot of fun to go out after a hard week of classes.

It was crazy to see a bar packed, literally to maximum capacity, with law school students. Eventually it became a little too much like a fraternity party: lots of random people, people bumping into each other, people yelling over one another, and the certain musk from lots of sweaty people in a confined space. Even worse is that they let people smoke in bars in DC, how very un-LA. So the crew I was hanging out with moved next door to a pool hall where it was still smokey but a lot less crowded. We had great, random conversations around the pool tables. One of my favorite quotes of the night was, "So I heard you were the President of the UCLA college dems. Wow, your constituency is bigger than like....Wyoming." Being a political dork and law student seem to go hand in hand. But the best part is that even though all these people love politics (and law I guess), they all have also very cool backgrounds whether it was a guy who worked in biotech for 2 years after graduating or the girl who worked in African refugee camps after graduating.

Sadly I can't go to the next two bar reviews because my parents are coming next week and I'm flying to Syracuse the week after that. But those will be just as fun. All I can say is thank goodness for these kind of mental breaks. Otherwise we would be more neurotic than a lot of us already are.

1 Down, 89 to Go

I came home from my first week of law school and I must say that I'm completely spent. I feel like I've done more work in the past 4 days than I did in the past 4 years of college. It's funny how we want to cherish every moment of undergrad and most of us here just want to survive and would prefer for the time to fly by. Nonetheless, I've met some great people and find most of the material pretty interesting.

Anyway, here are some lessons from week 1 of law school:

-You can walk into a class thinking you understand everything and leave 2 hours later more confused than ever.
-It is entirely possible that it could take 3 hours to understand a 3 page case.
-Just because the professor calls on volunteers doesn't mean you have to raise your hand for every single question and give long rambling answers when called upon. No matter how nice you may be, the rest of your class will talk about you and roll their eyes when you speak.
-People will sue over anything. Ok, I didn't need to go to law school to figure that out but these crazy lawsuits do make for the more interesting reading material.
-You would think that someone who was a clerk for a Supreme Court Chief Justice would be a structered and meticulous professor. This is completely not true.
-On that note, law school profs are either totally anally retentively organized or completely unorganized.
-Everything is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
-Never try to debate a law school professor, you will lose (luckily I didn't learn this from personal experience).
-Project Runway is even more amazing when it's a study break from contracts.
-Everyone around you feels exactly the same as you. Commiserate with them and go hang out with them on Thursday nights at Bar Review. Off I go...

Self Discipline

When faced with academic pressures, we all have to make sacrifices or control "excesses". Some people have to limit the amount of going out and partying that they do. Others have to limit how much tv they watch. My weakness is extracurriculars. I love to get involved.

So when I got an email from the Law School Dems for their first general meeting today, it took all the self control I could muster to NOT go to the meeting. Instead, I went to the law library for the first time ever and read for civ pro. After I finished my reading I went back to my locker to put my books back and I saw a pile of empty pizza boxes leftover from the Dems meeting. And you know what, I really smiled when I saw that.

For one, I'm glad I did not succumb to the temptation of the first Dems meeting. While it would have been easy to convince myself that this was just an intro meeting and I was just going to scope out what they were all about, I know all too well from experience that this is where they hook people in. "Oh, just sign up for what you have time for." Yeah, that doesn't work for club people like me. The introduction meeting is like the gateway drug. I could just see myself going and then before knowing it, signing up to help out in the midterm elections because this is a huge election, everyone around me was doing it, and I love politics. I may eventually check the club out, but not until I'm academically settled, which will be well beyond the November elections.

Secondly, as hungry as I was when I saw those pizza boxes, they made me even more glad I didn't go to the meeting. They say a big part of law school is just taking care of yourself physically and I know that pizza, especially combined with long nights of reading, is not good nourishment. Instead, I went home and cooked myself a healthy dinner. My roommate and I have found that taking the time to cook our dinners and pack our lunches definitely is a nice break, saves a ton of money, and is way healthier than buying junk.

Finally, I think now is the time when I develop habits. It's not impossible to change habits either way, but it's nonetheless to start off on the good food. So week 1 is where I want to show my priorities. And right now, that priority is adjusting to law school and studying. My secondary one is socialization/taking care of myself. I've done a pretty good job of going outside of my comfort zone and meeting new people. Tomorrow I'll be going to bar review and my "1 hour breaks" these past few days are either going to the gym or watching Project Runway. And lower on the priority tier (translate: can wait til later) are these club things that dominated my life at UCLA. I'm sure the Democratic party can forgive me for taking a sabbatical to refuel and serve them better by knowing the law and being a happy person.

On the Same Boat

Before coming to law school, my roommate showed me a blog written by two law school students who pinpointed the 10 law school archetypes. While I didn't remember all their "10 People You Meet At Law School," my roommate and I came up with our own observations of the unique characters at law school (which probably do overlap with the categories in their blog). We've pinpointed "that guy", the probably nice but annoying person who must always shoot his hand up for every single question. There's the trendy talkative girl with the feathered hair and skinny jeans. There's "frat row," the pack of fraternity looking boys who will always sit together and leave things early for happy hour. There's the "loud guy," who you can hear wherever you go because he has the most piercing voice and makes the stupidest comments. There's the "old guy," coming back to get his law degree after years working. And so on and so forth.

Yet what unites us all, all of these usual suspects and the rest of us who haven't formed an identity for everyone else to pinpoint, is that we are all just trying to get through law school. Doesn't matter if you talk all the time or just when you're called on; whether you're old or young. You'll always see people bond over how much reading we have to do, how complicated the cases are, and even how heavy the books are to lug around everywhere. Whether people worked for a few years or came straight out of undergrad like me, this is a completely new academic setting for everyone and I don't think anyone is fully prepared for such a lifestyle change. Imagine it being like undergraduate finals week every day.

This isn't meant to be a "woe is me, look at how much work I have" entry (I save that for my away messages), but rather to say that it's kind of a special bond that I feel with my fellow law school students, whether at American or at any other law school. Being a 1L is kind of like being an equalizer amongst so many different groups of people who were fortunate enough to have the oppurtunity to go to law school.

And I couldn't even imagine having a roommate right now that wasn't in law school. It's nice coming home and having someone else who doesn't think you're a nerd for going back to reading after a long day of class and will be up late and act delirious with you when you're sick of reading another 16th century court case.

First Day of School

I was going to entitle this post the beginning of the end since this will be my last "first day" at a new school. Because fittingly, I had a brand new backpack (though that's something that I haven't owned since 10th grade.) I packed a brown bag lunch with a turkey sandwich, carrots, and grapes. I got a lock for my locker. I found my bus route. I woke up early in anticipation. My roommate and I even took pictures of ourselves, as you can see here, since this would be our last first day of school.

However, my Civil Procedure professor put it another way. Using an analogy to how everything was measured by its distance from the center of Rome, he pointed out that the rest of our legal careers would be measured from our first day of law school. This is not an ending point. Rather, this is really the beginning of more than just law school; it's the beginning of hopefully long and successful careers. An equally scary and fun thought.

All in all though, I survived my first day of class. Besides sitting beside the probably nice but really annoying guy who has to answer every question, I thoroughly enjoyed my torts class. Met some nice people when I was eating lunch in the dining room. Civil procedure was a little more dry, but no horror stories like the movie the "Paper Trail" or "Legally Blonde." Basically it was uneventful and that's probably a good thing. So besides the potential back problems that I might suffer down the road from carrying too many case books (I'm working on a system to lessen this, don't worry), I left my first day of law school, the first day of the rest of my life, pretty much unscathed.

Finding that Balance

As I was reading my contracts coursebook today, there were some cases about parties not knowing what the paperwork that they were signing. As I was reading the cases, all I could think about was all the contracts in my life that I've signed without reading the fine print. You can practically sign away your life without knowing it; which is what must have happened when I signed the dotted line to go to law school.

I kid though, because more or less, I did know how much work I was getting myself into. Did I think that my kitchen table pre-first day of class would look like my kitchen table during finals week at UCLA? Maybe not but at least it's enjoyable (well, so far it is, ask me again in a few weeks or even days).

And despite all the reading and case briefing that I did today, I managed to get my head out of the books. After having a lovely 1.25 mile stroll this morning through cute DC neighborhoods, I arrived at church. Though most of the mass was very "old school" (read: a little boring) in the huge marble cathedral like building, there was a really good homily about replenishment. Basically, the priest was talking about how when he was in college, there would be people who would go around and do so many things that anything not productive seemed like a waste of time. Sound familiar? Well, he sensed that these people, mostly RAs in his building, were on the verge of meltdown so he took them out to pizza regularly so that they would have an inexpensive family style meal and reconnect with other people. Breaking bread, the priest said, was a way to reconnect with humanity, not just a form of substance. That was a nice little reminder before my first day of law school.

So in the spirit of the homily, I tried to strike a balance between the productive things I had to do, like all my reading, and other things. After church I sat on a bench for almost an hour enjoying the American University campus (ok, I was waiting for the bookstore to open but it felt nice to be out). I took a break from reading to watch Project Runway, ate dinner with my roommate, and went to the gym. Yeah, it's only day -1 of law school but I'm hoping that this will be a good start.