Day 'O Freedom

My roommate and I have been waiting for this day pretty much since the first day of school since we have been going full speed since that fateful day. We have been waitinf for this day of freedom from all law school responsibilities. Sometimes when you put so much expectation into a day, just like with any other event, those expectations are not met. This was definitely not the case today. Maybe being self-deprived of so many things that are normal to most people made us appreciate things even more. But I'm glad that we rediscovered the joy of our surroundings.

For me, it started early, since my body won't let me sleep in and I was up at 8am. I took a lovely morning stoll on this goergous 60 degree and sunny day to pick up some stellar purhcases from Craigslist. As I was walking back, I realized how much I love DC. There were a lot of people out walking their dogs, jogging, going to get a morning cup of coffee. Although some people complain that DC is not a real city, but it's a nice blend of city and residential for me. There is hustle and bustle but also an element of coziness.

After helping my roommate pick up her purhcase (yes, we went a little Craigslist crazy), we headed out to lunch at California Tortilla and then went to the zoo. I'm so spoiled that I live within walking distance of the National Zoo. The zoo is really the best place to feel carefree about the world. Just being surrounded by so many cute kids and babies is enough to put you in a good mood, and seeing baby pandas makes the day even better. If anyone ever visits, I will definitely take you, especially since its free.

Then this evening my roommate, two friends from UCLA, and I decided to go to the White House to see the giant Christmas tree, the 50 state + DC + US territory evergreen trees, and the giant menorah. Even though the giant Christmas tree was a little tacky, just seeing lights, hearing Christmas music, and being out in the city put me even more in the holiday mood. I feel like a less bitter version of Scrooge finding the joy of Christmas.

It's amazing how one day can refresh you so much and put you in such a good mood. All I need is one day but I will definitely be happy to take my full 3 weeks of winter vacation.

Stick A Fork In Me, I'm Done

15 weeks, 4 classes, tens of thousands of pages of readings (if only I were joking), hundreds of dorky law jokes, 2 memos, and 3 finals later and I am done with my first semester of law school. After many days of thinking hard and writing a lot, the only thing I can say right now is that I feel like this:

I'm calling it an early night tonight and sleeping in tomorrow because I can. Freedom!

These Are A Few of my Favorite Things: the finals edition

Seeing as my life is so one-tracked right now with finals, I am glad that I am an easily pleased person who appreciates the small things in life. Because if I didn't, I'm not sure how sane I would be right now. In honor of the 12 days until Christmas, here's a list of my 12 favorite things, in no particular order, that have made my first set of finals a little more bearable:

1. Swiffer Sweepers: Anyone who knows me knows that I love to clean when I get stressed out. And if you haven't tried it yourself, I highly recommend. When the world around you seems chaotic, you can at least put your apartment in order. Yes, instant gratification. So as a little "reward" for a days worth of studying, I got the swiffer sweeper I always wanted and cleaned our kitchen. Talk about a great invention. I may sound weird, but don't knock the cleaning until you've tried it.

2. Craigslist: Admist learning about offer and acceptances, I put my contracts learning to work by reviving my love of web-window shopping on Craigslist. Since it is the end of the year and a lot of people are moving, my roommate and I capitalized on some great deals. For example: 2 nice barstools both for $15, a humidifier for $15, a toaster for $5, and a blender, mixing bowls, and frying pan combination package for $15. That's a lot of saving for all very pracitcal purchases. If there's anything I love more than shopping, it's great deals.

3. The smell of pumpkin: Oh yeah, we bought a muffin tin too from Craigslist so I was naturally inclined to make some healthy pumpkin cranberry muffins for my roommate and my study group. If you're going to be stuck in your apartment studying, there's nothing better than opening your oven and having your whole apartment smell like pumpkin and spices.

4. TV: After every final, I have decompressed my brain infront of the televsion. Nothing like watching a few episodes of Law & Order to remind you why you wanted to go to law school.

5. Our front desk people: It's always nice to come back to your apartment and be greeted by familiar faces of nice people. My roommate and I like to try to piece together who these people are, especially from listening in on their conversations when we're downstairs filling up on the...

6. Free Coffee in the Lobby: Thank you to Charles E. Smith apartments and your free coffee in the lobby. Even though I try not to drink too much, it has been there when I needed to battle study fatigue. And I also rekindled my love for the smell of coffee.

7. NYTimes Wedding Page: This is going to make me sound like I want get married right now but I don't (not until I'm at least 25), but I love reading this NYT page. I might not come off as a lovey-dovey romantic type, but I'm a total sap for reading stories about how couples met. They're very cute, and very appreciated and unexpected change of pace from leading casebooks all day.

8. Electronic Communication: I get really excited when I get a little message in my inbox telling me that someone wrote on my facebook wall. Or sent a facebook message. Or sent a text. Or instant messaged. Or even emailed. Basically, I'm longing for human contact, even if through an electronic medium. As much as I love Judge Learned Hand and Judge Cardoza, they're just not as loving or funny as my friends and family.

9. Christmas lights: I love the way they twinkle, especially the white ones. A little reminder that it is the holiday season.

10. The Humidifier: I may sound like an old woman, but I love mine. And I'm in company too because I know a lot of people my age who have purchased or looking to purchase humidifiers. It's just really dry over here and turning on the heat in the apartment zaps away all of the moisture. Moreoever, there's something nostalgic about them since I used to have one for a kid.

11. Study Group + Rommate: I'm pretty lucky that I found people that I can study really well around and make lots of dorky law school jokes with. I swear, sometimes it feels like we're speaking in another language. And I'm even luckier, that I like just hanging out around these people in a non-studying context (even when we say we're having a study group) because it has really kept me calm.

12. Winter Break: Need I really explain why? Only days away from family, friends, California, Vietnam, and nothing law school. Just the thought of it makes me smile.

Creative Community Service

I remember going to a leadership conference in 10th grade and having a panel discuss young people and altruism. I don't remember exactly what the people on the panel said but I do remember the discussion that our table had afterwards. We had a debate about whether or not high schools should make community service mandatory. While some argued that community service should come out of the goodness of one's heart and it would not be good to have high school students in the community who don't want to be there, I prudently was in favor of the idea.

Naturally, we all want people to do community service and other altrustic things simply to help people. But I do think some people need a little push, an incentive to repriortize. A lot of people say they want to help others, but they don't spend time or as much time as they want doing it; I know from personal experience. I don't think that schools should force students to do a ton of hours, but just a few hours at least to remind them to give back somewhere. From what I've noticed, once most students actually start their community service work (whether they were originally exicted to do it or not), they end up really enjoying it and a lot of people continue to do it outside of their assignment. And above all else, work for others is being accomplished. Even if people did a bare minimum of what was requested of them, some time is better than none.

I know this idea wouldn't be very popular because people already say that high school students are overworked, but I am glad that at least I went to a church where we had to do 25 hours of community service per year. And I remember catching "the bug" and spending hundreds of hours at different projects. Pretty much the only thing about college that I regret was not being able to do more service projects, but I do remember the ones that I did were very memorable and rewarding. So I guess that's why when I went to law school, I was really excited to participate in the school's community service day and Pro Bono Honors Pledge Program, where I have made a committment to do at least 75 hours over three years. It might not sound like a lot, but I think it would be very easy to put that aside, especially in law school. The pledge is completely voluntary and you don't get anything besides the sheer satisfaction of helping people, but I think its a good system to keep yourself accountable for what you actually want to do.

Perhaps a pledge program would be better than mandatory hours, but until that is even in place at a larger level, I think a great way to motivate people to give is making it fun. I've actually seen some really great ideas lately such as a toy drive at a elementary school in Santa Clarita that had kids give food and they could put it in the UCLA bucket or USC bucket and every so many cans would be a "touchdown." Speaking of the rivalry, appparently UCLA had a clothing drive where people could trade in their red clothing for a UCLA shirt and all of the red clothing would go to a shelter. At law school, my fraternity collected cans of food in exchange for "immunity" for being called on in class. At the main campus, they also collected cans but you could get part of your library fees (you know for all those overdue books) knocked down for every can you brought in. And in our building, there is a raffle for fun things around DC and the money for the raffle tickets goes towards the major AIDS clinic in DC.

I'm not trying to make community service all Machiavellian and say that you should use whatever means to get people to go out into their communities and serve, but I do applaud creative efforts to get people to do it. And while some people might raise a susicious eyebrow and say that you shouldn't give people rewards for something that they should be doing anyway, I say that its always a little selfish. You know that Friends episode where Joey challenges Phoebe to do a charitable act where she doesn't benefit from feeling good doing it, it's that. You should feel good, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Testing Tribulations Part Two

Another fifteen pages of typing down, though this time in a mere three hours, and I am done with my second law school final. If my first final was a 9 hour marathon, this test would be more like a gauntlet. There were just questions thrown at us from left and right and you had to keep your concentration to make it to the end. Essentially we had to answer 11 questions, each with many subparts, in 3 hours. Some of the questions may have seemed weird at first and it would be easy to get thrown off and panic. But you just keep going and sometimes the answer does come to you (as it hopefully did for the last question where I had my ephiphany with 15 minutes left to crank it out).

Although this was my second test, it was my first in-class examination. How different it was from my undergraduate finals that were in class. Here everyone had piles of books, handouts, supplements, and of course our cherished outlines, surrounding our computers. A significant amount of people had ear plugs, all of different colors which cutely poked out of their ears (I had a pair of bright orange ones but I decided not to use them because I can hear myself breathe and they make me feel like I'm underwater). And some people even came prepared with little bottles of wine and hard liquor in their bags for after the test. It was quite amusing.

And of course taking my class with my classmates, I was surrounded by people freaking out before and after the test. I think the only time I've been surrounded by so many people on edge was at the LSAT (notice, future law school students, we're a special neurotic breed). There were definitely people at the verge of breakdowns yesterday and it was difficult to know what to say to them other than "it's going to be alright." People getting physically ill and throwing up before the test, people whose eyes were red from crying, people making phone calls telling their parents they might drop out of law school. And if you weren't having a breakdown, you had to avoid being shaken by the people who had already lost it. I'm very grateful that my roommate and most of my friends around me were also calm and I think we all helped each other stay in the zone.

I just hope that everyone is doing better now because there is still one (or two for some people) final left in this mind game known as long school. I know I'm ready to finish this week out and I'm so excited to go home and see everyone. Having things to look forward too has definitely helped my peace of mind. Finals week has taught me more than ever that this whole law school experience is equally about mental strength and endurance as it is about intelligence.

How Did I Get into Law School?

For the past few weeks, my roommate and I have been sitting in our apartment freezing cold. I would layer myself in long sleeve shirts and sweatshirts, wear wool socks and my moccasins, and wrap myself up in blankets. I really thought that we were just weak Californians, unable to deal with the 30 degree weather outside. And we even had the heat on full blast...or so we thought.

Since my roommate and I have spent the vast majority of the past few weeks cooped up in our apartment studying for finals, I didn't think we fully registered that our apartment was significantly colder than most living spaces should be. That is until we went to study at our friends' apartment and were really warm. Maybe I wasn't crazy for thinking that the air coming out of our heater wasn't as warm as it was supposed to be. So we finally put in a work order and the apartment repairman came by.

Turns out our heater was broken. Instead of it being 75 degrees, as we had set it to, our apartment was actually around 50 degrees. The nice repairman fixed our heater and replaced the burnt out light in our dining room. Wow, what a difference. Warmth!

Though I might not be as climate-challenged as I thought I was, I might just make up for it in being common sensically challenged.

Ask And Ye Shall Receive

I was a little sad when I realized that today at the University Catholic Center at UCLA, they would be doing the blessing of the brains. Probably the busiest time at the UCC (no, not the uniform commercial code for all you law dorks) was right before finals week. In addition to more people being at school to study on the weekend, more people also went for some peace of mind and to get a brain blessing. I always remember being a little bitter at sometimes not having a seat at those masses, kind of like how I'm slightly bitter when it's so hard to get a seat at Christmas & Easter mass (I know, Catholic means universal and we're supposed to be welcoming, I'm working on it).

Anyway, I was bummed that I couldn't get my brain blessed and Alex suggested that I just ask the priest for a blessing. Unfortunately last week, the priest presiding over the mass is the seemingly mean priest that I don't really care for. So I was really excited when I saw the priest that I like this week (his first homily that I heard was about how college kids sharing pizza is like breaking bread).

So after mass I mustered up the courage and asked him for a brain blessing. He kind of looked at me funny and then I explained how at my old parish they used to give us a blessing for finals week. He was happy to do it and we chatted for a little bit about finals, taking the bar, and law school. I accidently told him that I had taken 2 finals already, when I meant to say that I had taken a final and turned in a big paper, but I didn't realize until I started walking away. I felt horrible for feeling like I lied to a priest, especially after he gave me a blessing, but I have to admit I was a little nervous. I always tend to get nervous asking people for things (yeah working on that too), even priests who do this for a living and who are very nice. But I'm glad I did it and now I have a little extra help from the Big Guy.