divine angst

1. I think I may be off the hook in Con Law for the rest of the semester. Not only did I volunteer an answer, I was also cold-called. I did well, I think, on both, so I think I can sit silently in the future without feeling guilty. At least until we get into more interesting material. Or are we covering more interesting material now? I haven’t decided.
2. Also, I need a second opinion. I received a baby shower invitation today. The shower is for a relative. It is in about three weeks. It is about 1100 miles away. Clearly, there is no expectation that I will actually attend. So is the invitation a thoughtful gesture, or is it a tacky plea for a gift?
3. I found the cutest pair of boots today. If they were black, I’d've bought them immediately, budget be damned! But they are brown, and I am not sure I need sassy brown boots, even at 50% off. Plus, Mr. Angst and I have a night out planned on Wednesday–we’re going dancing, which we haven’t done in probably close to a year. Part of me feels like, if we weren’t planning for that (which won’t be that pricey, but will involve buying drinks, maybe a little food, and maybe a cab ride), I could feel a little freer about spending the money.
4. Have any of you students ever emailed a professor, one who is not exactly known for being horrible about Socratic method, to tell him/her you weren’t going to be prepared?

So, there’s not much on TV Saturday afternoons, so Mr. Angst and I are watching Air Force One. This movie, my friends, is a silly movie. It is very implausible and over the top. Gary Oldman spends all of his screen time chewing the scenery. Harrison Ford spends the entire movie playing President Han Solo. William H. Macy is criminally underused.

So those things contribute to the silliness of the movie. But the biggest reason this movie is silly is because it has five endings. FIVE. Things start going SUPER for President Solo and Team America, but then Team Russia gets smart. And then President Solo kills a bad guy. And then someone fires missiles at Air Force One. But someone on Team America gets in the way of the missile. And so on, and so on, and so on. And then the airplane makes a cartwheel into the ocean.

So, this movie is silly. But there’s nothing else on TV. So that’s what we’re watching. Sigh.

I had to get out of the house today.

I usually spend all day Saturday inside, watching TV and reading blogs and avoiding homework. But today, that was NOT going to fly. I wanted some fresh air and I wanted it TODAY. Granted, it’s cold right now, but it’s not insanely freezing, and my weather widget said it would just be cloudy. Mr. Angst and I headed out, then, to get some lunch and walk around the neighborhood.

So, OK, we felt some sprinkly wetness as we headed out, but figured it was just the humidity in the air. Within three blocks, though, it was genuinely snowing, little pellet-like pieces of snow. So we tucked into a little restaurant and had lunch, thinking we could wait out the weather. But no, while we were inside, the snow got fluffier and fluffier and fluffier–big cotton ball clumps of snow. Discouraged, we headed home.

And do you know what? Within a block of home, the snow had stopped and the sun was even peeking out.

The weather gods hate me.

The week is over.

La!

It turns out that the cases and notes I tried to cram into my head last night were not touched on in class today–or at least, not the ones I didn’t retain. Lucky, that. It also turns out that I was only an alternate bailiff for Moot Court, and they didn’t need me, so I got to leave school, come home, see my husband, and write a response paper for a different class. Not so much a night off, but somehow soothing.

In other words, I’m ending the week with a little less whimper than I thought I would. I read all the things I needed to read for the week (or I read the equivalents in a commercial supplement), I turned in all the assignments I needed turn in, and I went to all the events I needed to go to. For an overcommitted law student, I’m doing pretty well, I think. I feel, in fact, sort of light; less burdened. Mr. Angst is done with his midterms, too, so that makes things better.

Frankly, I feel so good that I’m tempted to go work out!

Argh. Today has not been the best day. It started with, well, La Neighbor and her rockin’-out-in-the-shower ways (and, also, the flaunt-her-towel-draped-body-while-screaming-about-her-lack-of-furniture thing). It continued when Mr. Angst and I had a minor spat (over bread, of all stupid things), and it has just continued All Damn Day Long.

I am so behind on all my reading because I have had ZERO time to do it this week, what with Appellate Brief Nonsense and Law School Musical rehearsal and, you know, Sleep. And tonight I’m bailiff-ing for Moot Court. No time! NO TIME! I won’t even be home until late this evening, and that’s no good, since I won’t have seen Mr. Angst all day and he has midterms this week and is also stressed out and fretful. Is it any wonder I am in such a crappy mood?

To be fair, my brother helped me relax a little today by telling me about the puppies he’s going to look at this weekend (so cute! extra skin!); and then we laughed about one of the other dogs, who has a yeast infection on his skin, and how Brother should really just slather yogurt on him instead of paying for prescription medication. But snorty laughter in the library does not make your fellow students like you very much, so I had to stop IMing and try reading Civ Pro. I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything, though, because I am so tapped out, so I don’t think I retained any of it.

Basically, what I really need right now is for someone to find my brain and give it back to me.

Our new neighbor is SO LOUD.

She plays her music REALLY LOUD in the morning. So Mr. Angst went over to tell her we could hear her music. The whole time he was talking to her, I could hear her out in the hall apologizing LOUDLY, practically screaming, “I’m SO SORRY!” She told Mr. Angst–and our whole floor, probably–all about how some of her furniture hasn’t arrived and so all her stuff is on the floor by the window and that’s why it’s so loud. And while she’s telling him this, she’s wrapped in her towel. Well, not wrapped, more like draped. She had been in the shower. And she likes to be able to hear the music while she’s in the shower. So she cranks it up, every morning. Most particularly, she cranked it up THIS morning, the one morning my early class got pushed back to later in the day, and I was trying to keep sleeping because, well, I could.

Oh boy. Love new neighbors.

Well, look at that.

Somehow I made it out of the hole, yet I still find myself completely overwhelmed and without any time to post substantively. Maybe that’s because I’ve been neglecting my reading for my other classes; maybe it’s because I had a make-up class today, and so had to do extra reading. Maybe it’s because I had an interview this morning to prepare for–and to, apparently, dream about.

Yeah, let me tell you about that dream.

Sometime in the early morning hours, I started to have a waking dream. You know, one of those that seems so real, when you wake up, you don’t quite know what’s happened, because you thought you were already awake? Yeah, one of those. And what I dreamed was that I had overslept. Really, not the end of the world, since I had class before my interview, and skipping that class would not have been the end of the world.

Except that in my dream, I WAY overslept. And I had something like 40 minutes to shower, do my hair, dress, and get to school for my interview. And things kept going wrong. Like, my shower took twice as long as it normally does. And my suit jacket somehow didn’t fit. Also, the tags were still on my suit jacket, and for some reason, I couldn’t get them off. Maybe I don’t own any scissors in my dream world. Nothing was going right, and I was beginning to panic, and that made everything worse. Maybe this isn’t such a weird dream after all.

At any rate, the alarm went off right as I (in my dream) was running, full speed, for the train. I woke to find that I was still in bed, it was before 7 am, and I had all the time in the world. So I snoozed.

In other words, I’m out of the hole, but apparently no one told my subconscious.

Oh — one final thing. If I’m sending a writing sample to a potential employer, should I do anything special to it? Like, put a cover sheet on it? It’s a full memo, so I figured I didn’t need to preface it with a lot of information about the legal issues. Right now, I just have my name and phone number at the top of each page and no cover sheet. Is that sufficient?

You know how sometimes, when things are completely muddy, you have a moment of clarity? And things suddenly make sense?

I’m having one of those moments. It’s pretty cool. I kind of wish it had happened a couple of days ago, though.

Almost out of the hole.

This week, frankly, is hell. What’s more unfair about it, besides it being hell, is that Mr. Angst has three midterms this week. So I am freaked and stressed out, and so is he. Two stressed out graduate students sharing a home does not a fun home make. I can’t take care of him, he can’t take care of me, and meanwhile, the apartment is going to shit.

Or, it was. I got sick of it today and scrubbed down the kitchen–countertops, sink, stovetop (including the burner covers, which are GROSS, but thankfully you can buy new ones for a couple of bucks). I’m going to take a load off for an hour or so, and then I’m going to pull out ALWD and start fixing my citations and footnotes for my appellate brief. Tomorrow is for editing the writing and sentence structure–as well as reading mountains of Con Law and Civ Pro II. Argh.

What I’m basically saying here, in this boringest of posts, is that posting will continue to be light until I can come up for air in a couple of days. Honestly, it might even be the end of the week before things feel back to normal.

I came to law school because I wanted to write. I think I’ve mentioned that here before, but I’m putting it out there again, just for the record. Writing is something I’ve always been good at, though I’ve never been all that prolific. I always seemed to have trouble coming up with something to write about. First, I’m no creative writer or poet–I missed the make-up-a-story gene. And while I love writing essays, I’ve always had trouble getting started without a prompt.

So law school, I thought, would be great for me. Prompts aplenty, what with all the legal issues in the world that I find interesting. And structure, too! I really thought writing in law school would be easy for me. Not that I wouldn’t have to learn the specifics of “legal” writing, but that once I figured out the formats and expectations, I’d just be able to jump in.

It’s not like that.

For the first time in a long while, I have a prompt, I have structure, and I even have a dozen good arguments/ideas to discuss in a paper, but the words are coming slowly. Each one is struggle. My progress is halting at best.

Time was I’d've thought this was a bad sign, a sign that I was going about things the wrong way or that I just didn’t know enough about my subject to be able to get the words going. I don’t believe that anymore, because I can look at what I’ve been able to put on paper so far and see that it’s good. It’s not great, it needs editing, it needs tightening, but it’s good. Still, what slow going it’s been!

This is sort of transformative for me, looking at writing as something that’s not always accompanied by an outpouring. Rather, it’s a careful craft that is sometimes stalled, sometimes halting, sometimes painful–and when it is those things, it can still be good.

So, um, I don’t want to offend any of you who ARE on the quarter system, but I do want to point out how glad I am that I am NOT. I don’t have exams in a month, nor do I have midterms next week, like Mr. Angst does.

That is all.

So I was totally about to post about how I am just feeling completely overwhelmed–half of my appellate brief is due next week, I have an overload of reading to do because I have a makeup class next week, I have had exactly NO time to make followup calls about the resumes I’ve sent, and, to top it all off, I very nearly broke my neck by catching my heel on the stairs. (I think I did wrench my neck and twist my wrist, though, in catching myself on the bannister. Fun.)

Note: I WAS going to post about all that.

And then I heard someone near me freaking out on the phone with his bank, trying to use the voice commands. It’s like that commercial, with the guy on the train, trying to do the same thing, screaming, “Big Boy!” “Make a payment!” so he can get a real person and talk about his statement. (I’m not kidding. It was seriously exactly like that.) And I lost it, laughing. So did the guy’s friend.

I feel better now, flush with some endorphins from a good two minutes of laughter. I needed that, actually, since this week has just been Too Much.

I’m just still in a hole. I can see a little more of the sky now, though.

Lemme throw out another mystifier.

There’s this firm, let’s call them Pretty, Big & Fancy, My career services advisor recommended I send a resume to them, because they seem to have practice areas I’m interested in. (They were also interviewing on campus, as part of Winter OCI, but I didn’t get an interview with them.)

Yesterday, I got a letter from them–a rejection letter, naturally–in response to my resume, which stated that they had had so much success with their 2L recruiting that they weren’t hiring any 1Ls.

Excuse me, what? They’re not hiring 1Ls, but they interviewed three of my friends (and at least 10 other people) here on my campus last week? So either the person writing the letter fibbed because it seemed nicer or that person didn’t know they were interviewing 1Ls on campus. Either way, not a good sign.