divine angst

Welcome to the post-Christmas, pre-New Year edition of the law school roundup, featuring posts inspired by (or just published during) the holidays. Enjoy!

• Dreams Someone needs more vacation Law and Floss
• Scheduling Just remember, the best laid plans . . . Legally numb
• Caffeination All by yourself PT-LawMom
• Cuteness Even Calvin was cuter than law school Butterflyfish
• Nightmare Sending prayers for continued improvement! Knocked Up (and in Law School) (updates: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6)
• Different But still special Lag Liv
• Perspective Just count them up My So-Called Internet-based Life
• Quizmaster! Tune in tomorrow, y’all! Peanut Butter Burrito
• Conversion Mmmmmm, bacon. Think Like a Woman. Act Like a Man.

And that’s it for this week’s Roundup. Look for it next week at Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground. It’ll be back here in two weeks.

After a week of travel and family and Christmas and food and more food and presents and more food, Mr. Angst and I are back home with Himself.^[1]

All is right with the world.

1. Who, by the way, is completely zonked out. Maybe just being boarded is exhausting for him? He doesn’t get as much exercise as he might when boarded since he can’t be put in with the general population of dogs to play and wear himself out, but he’s definitely worn out. Maybe he feels a little like I do—he’s home and can finally relax. ↩

We have dropped off Himself to be boarded over the next week while we are in Texas with my family. I hate boarding him, but this is really the best option—it’s impossible to fly with an animal, even a relatively small and terribly well-behaved one, and driving is just out of the question in years when we spend the holidays with my family. (The Angst-in-laws are within driving distance.)

The particular trouble this year is that we couldn’t board where we usually do—our vet. Our former upstairs neighbor works at our vet, so we feel very comfortable leaving him there—and they all love him and know his personality and temperament and he comes home happy. But we didn’t call our vet soon enough this year to get a spot over the Christmas holidays, so we’ve had to board him somewhere else, which makes me even sadder than usual. I’m usually pretty sad after dropping him off, but when he’s at the vet, at least I know he’s loved and gets plenty of attention and that makes it easier. This time around, we’ve had to board him at a local kennel—which gets very good reviews all around—but it’s just not the same.

So now I’m sitting at home, taking a little rest before I finish packing and cleaning the apartment, and looking at Himself’s little bed and just missing him. It doesn’t help that I’m watching The Wizard of Oz and Toto is just so cute—and a terrier, with that familiar intelligent gleam in his eye—and I just really wish I had my dog to hug on.

I promised a follow-up, so here it is!

First, if someone at UPS tells you something you either don’t believe or don’t want to hear, call back and talk to someone else. Yesterday, I called UPS to check on the status of my claim, and the girl I spoke to said she couldn’t tell me anything since I wasn’t the shipper. I told her that the shipper didn’t call in the claim, that there was no problem with the shipper, that I brought it to the attention of UPS, and I was pretty sure the shipper didn’t know there WAS a problem. She said, “No, we’ve been in touch with the shipper. You’ll have to contact them for updates.”

That seemed fishy to me, but I let it go, because I had an exam to take. And I went and took my exam and then did some post-exam shopping, and then came home to get ready to go out and have fun, celebrating the end of the semester.

But this morning, I got nervous—after all, Christmas is on Tuesday, and I still didn’t know if this package was going to arrive on time. So I called UPS again. This time, I got a more helpful—and probably smarter, and possibly less harried—customer service agent. I told her what I’d been told yesterday and she said (and this is EXACTLY what she said and I wish I could replicate her tone), “What? Really?”

So I explained to her that I was getting desperate, and I needed to know something. And she was great. She took a look at the history of my package (and as she was looking at it said something like, “OK, shipped to Texas, and then . . . oh wow, Florida, wow, how did THAT happen . . . what the heck? . . . OK . . . Yeah, we’re still trying to locate that box. Boy that’s strange!). She told me they are still trying to get in touch with Florida Lady. She told me UPS would reimburse the shipper the cost of sending me a new package overnight so it would arrive by Christmas. Though she said I’d need to call them and arrange for the new shipment, she also said if they gave me trouble, to just conference them in with UPS so the UPS people could corroborate my story.

So that’s what I did. (Well, the conference call wasn’t necessary, thank goodness.) The company has already sent out a new package, overnight delivery, and they told me they would deal with UPS from now on, so I didn’t need to worry about anything.

Despite the tremendous hassle this was—from trying (in vain) to reach Florida Lady, to calling UPS multiple times, to calling the shipper multiple times (they’re a small company and don’t appear to have very many more than one customer service person), to being generally very fretful about all of this at a time when I was trying to prepare for my exam—it all worked out pretty well, and I am pretty happy with both UPS and with the company I bought this gift from. With the exception of that one customer service girl, everyone has been very nice and very understanding of how important it is that I get this package before Christmas. They’ve all been very accommodating, and I appreciate that.

I guess this delivery horror story is now just cocktail party fodder. (And I think it will be terrific in that role—I’ve told the story to a few friends already and the universal response has been shock and amazement of the really gratifying kind.) I’m glad everything turned out well enough that I can continue to tell the story and have it be humorous, rather than a reminder of something more bitter and ugly.

Did you think you’d get through this holiday season without having to read a delivery horror story from me?

You’d be wrong.

Today’s doghouse resident: UPS.

I am proudest of one of the first gifts I ordered this holiday season. Inspiration struck me out of the blue, and I knew exactly what to get this particular family member. So I ordered this particular (very cool) gift right away, on December 6. The next day I got an email from the company I ordered from telling me my order had been fulfilled and giving me the tracking number. I cheered, knowing that at least one gift was taken care of and would arrive at my dad’s house in Texas in plenty of time to be opened on Christmas Day. I didn’t track the package because I figured it would get there when it got there, and I wouldn’t be down there to open it and wrap it until the 23rd.

On Monday, I got a phone call from a nice lady in Florida telling me that she had my package and wanted to know when I could come pick it up.

Florida Lady’s address is the same as my dad’s—except for, of course, the CITY, STATE, and ZIP CODE.

I immediately got online and looked up the tracking number so I could see what the heck was going on. I first blamed the vendor—the stupid company probably got the address wrong on the shipping label, so I’d just call and make them send a new order to the correct address, and deal with getting the other order back on their own time. But the invoice showed the correct address—me, care of my dad, at his address in Texas. So I pulled up the tracking information.

There it was, on December 12:

[CITY], TX: A CORRECT STREET NUMBER IS NEEDED FOR DELIVERY. UPS IS ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN THIS INFORMATION / THE ADDRESS HAS BEEN CORRECTED. THE DELIVERY HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED

And then they sent it to Florida.

I spent quite a bit of time on the phone yesterday morning with UPS trying to figure out (a) how this happened, (b) how I was going to get my package, since Florida Lady had given me her phone number but wasn’t answering her phone and her voice mail was full, and (c) what UPS was going to do to FIX IT.

To be fair, UPS was very apologetic (though I am sure it is in the customer service script that they are to apologize every time they say anything to a customer who has lost a package), and they are doing everything they can to get my package back from Florida Lady and on to Texas. They also got detailed information on what was in the box (including item numbers), presumably so that, if the package is gone, they can just call the vendor and order a new one on their dime and overnight it to Texas in time for Christmas.

Of course, I’m not completely won over—after all, they screwed up. I am just not sure how someone in Texas decided that my dad’s perfectly valid address was not valid, and then how that someone decided that I really meant the package to go to the same address but in a different city and state. I bet there are other cities in this country that also have an address with the same number and street as my dad’s—I guess I’m lucky they happened to send it to someone who was nice enough to call me and say, Hey, I’ve got your package here!

Simply unbelievable. I’ll keep you posted on what happens next.

I just finished watching the new trailer for The Dark Knight, and let me say, while I spent a good chunk of my summer seriously annoyed by the transportation snafus filming caused around here (bus reroutes, street closures, etc.), I also spent a good chunk of my summer keeping an eye on what buildings and streets were being filmed as well as what “set pieces” were left sitting around on streets^[1] and it is Very Cool to see those streets and buildings showing up even just in the trailer. It’s just going to be that much cooler to see the movie when it comes out next summer, right before I have to take the bar.

1. This doesn’t even mention the very cool bit of filming I and some friends saw one night, which I am pretty sure is ALSO in the trailer, though not the whole thing, and not the thing that we saw that was the coolest. ↩

I won’t say I don’t like having a little more time to study and prepare my outline. I do—I think I’ve been able to absorb more of the material this way, internalize it more.

But because of this “leisurely” study pace, I feel like I’ve been working on B.A. for-ev-er. (I kind of have—at least a week now, by my count.) I need to just get done with all this outlining stuff and print the damn thing out, tab it all to hell, and start doing practice exams.

I only have a few more pages of notes to process, so I should be able to start the tabbing tonight. Practice tests tonight and tomorrow. Exam tomorrow afternoon or Thursday morning. And then?

Back to journal editing. Yeah, no wonder I’m taking my time.

We have passed into the triple digits for this iteration of the Law School Roundup! In celebration, I present you with holiday-themed (or not) posts by law students present and past. Happy Holidays, all!

• Festive holiday treats 2Lwannabe
• . . . except when they’re not, really Law and Floss
• Finally preparing, now that exams are over PT-LawMom
• Exams should also be festive Thanks, But No Thanks
• Things that make you go, “Awwwww!” Butterflyfish
• The best Christmas present evar. Knocked Up (and in Law School)
• Maybe it was a present? Dagny’s Law Blog
• Better late than never, even if you give up a nap. Frequent Citations
• Christmas decorations and music make studying better katlet
• Summing up the year Lag Liv
• “What are you, a house-elf?” Magic Cookie
• Holiday lights Modern Acropolis
• COOKIES!!! My So-Called Internet-based Life
• Monkeys! Peanut Butter Burrito
• Buy that dog a Hanukkah present! think like a woman. act like a man.

Look for next week’s roundup at Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground and, in two weeks, right back here.

This weather makes my skin dry, which usually manifests in an itchy back or ankles. Until today. My fingers were itching, so I took off my rings to discover dry, peeling skin underneath. Ack! My rings are platinum, so I’m pretty sure this isn’t an allergic reaction, so I’m hoping it’s just the weather. Even so, it’s pretty pissy that my rings are rubbing my finger in a way that LOOKS like I’m allergic to them.

Yucky.

I have a task chair at my desk, and it’s really all I need. My desk is small and compact and I like having a small and compact chair to go with it.

However, the small, compact chair has its drawbacks. Notably, it’s a little unstable if I lean over in it. Usually I can tell if it’s starting to tip in time to correct it, but not always. Even when it does tip, I’m usually right by the futon in the office, so I catch myself—or I’ve got my feet planted on the ground because I’m leaning over in the chair to get something from the printer, so I just end up half-squatting, half-standing while the chair skates across the floor on its side.

Well, yesterday I was leaning over in my chair, towards the futon, because I wanted to play with the dog. The dog was on the futon, blocking my easiest path to safety when the chair skidded out from under me. So I landed on the floor. On my butt. Hard.

It wasn’t fun at the time, but I didn’t think it was all that big a deal. It didn’t bother me at all yesterday afternoon and evening.

But I got up this morning, and my butt hurts. It even hurts to sit on the soft, cushy couch. I’m afraid to actually look at it because I’m sure it’s ugly and bruised. My butt is bruised. Because of my cheap chair.

I am not making as much progress in studying as I was earlier this week. The problem is a familiar one. It seems like it happens every year, and this year is no different: I am missing that sense of urgency. I’m just not scared. This year is different, though. Usually I’m not scared because I know I have time and my brain thinks it works better under pressure. This year, though, I have an additional factor—I am too comfortable with the material. I’ve enjoyed this class a lot, more than I expected to, and I have an affinity for the kind of analysis required. So not only do I have plenty of time, but also I’m just not worried about the material. (Note: I should be worried—no exam is easy enough to take without some serious preparation. This is just my brain tricking me into being lazy.)

At any rate, I’m struggling to motivate myself when all I really want to do is curl up in front of the fire with my dog and wait out the snow. After a semester of doing nothing but working, working, working, under high levels of stress and while dealing with many, many frustrations, I kind of feel like I deserve a more relaxing exam period, especially when I only have one exam. But I also have a hard time escaping from the guilt of not working when I have work to do.

I like the snow.  It’s so pretty when it’s coming down and when it’s fresh and new and white.  What I hate is when the snow turns into big gray piles of gross on the side of the street.  Which is what the snow will be like when I actually have time—and the inclination—to go out in it.

That just makes me sound lazy, doesn’t it? That I’m only on my second day of outlining? I’m not lazy, I just had a bunch of (non-exam-related) stuff to catch up on after finishing a big round of journal stuff last weekend, and my exam isn’t until next Thursday.

Day 2 is much like Day 1: I am ensconced on the couch with my casebook, a Legalines keyed to my casebook (this is the book that smells like Raid), and an E&E for the first few weeks of the course. That’s right—I have TWO E&Es for this course. I love the E&E books, but there isn’t a “Business Organizations” or “Business Associations” E&E. So I had to get the Agency, Partnerships & LLCs E&E as well as the Corporations E&E. This is way more E&E than I need—I kind of flipped out as I was reading through part of the agency stuff yesterday and wondered if I really missed all this stuff on ratification and multilevel agency relationships. And then I calmed down and realized that I didn’t take Agency, I took Business Associations, and we didn’t go over that stuff. See? This is why, even if I zone out in class, the fact that I go to class is important. I know we didn’t go over ratification in any detail and I KNOW we didn’t talk about multilevel agency relationships in any detail. I hope. No, I’m pretty sure we didn’t. I’m good.

Anyway, today is Partnerships. Maybe a little on the formation of Corporations, if I get that far.

Oh, I also have a big cup of coffee next to me, and a batch of no-knead bread doing its second rise (having done its first, 22-hour rise yesterday and overnight). I can study like this—it’s almost leisurely, and leaves time for relishing the Christmas season (my tree is up).

The worst part about studying is getting started. Once I get started, I can usually get on a roll and just go.

Of course, each time I stop to get more coffee, go get the latest packages (pressies!), take the dog out, use the bathroom, answer the phone, etc., I have to Get Started again.

The only good thing here is that I have plenty of time to work through my notes at a reasonable pace. Otherwise I’d be flipping out.

I am a bit ashamed that I’ve become the kind of person who can’t order at Starbucks in fewer than 10 words.

At least my drink only costs $1.60.

And there I went, disappearing on you for another long stretch! This blogging thing is getting harder and harder!

I want to write something on the difference between how I study now versus how I studied two years ago, but I’m also kind of afraid to sit down and think about how I study now versus how I studied two years ago. My grades are, basically, the same as they were then (with the exception of one semester that Shall Never Be Spoken Of), so I’m not really sure how valuable such a post would be—either for anyone reading or for myself. Because the basic gist is that I spend much less time outlining (I do still outline, I just do it more quickly) and much more time zoning out in class (but I do still go to class, only missing when I absolutely can’t help it), but I end up getting the same basic grades.

Or maybe not. My most unexpected (good) grade from last semester was in the class I went to every time but one, paid attention every day, and outlined earliest. My most unexpected (bad) grade was in the class I missed several of, outlined last, and took last. Hm. Maybe I’m wrong about how I study.

In any case, I am super busy right now, finishing up some last-minute stuff for the semester, so I don’t really have the time to give such a post the treatment it deserves. So I’ll make do with this cheery message:

Your grades are what they are. Do your best. Prepare as fully as you can. Take the exam. And then forget about it. If the grade isn’t good, deal with it. Play up your other strengths when you’re interviewing—get involved in a student organization or volunteer with a local legal aid group. Take a clinic. Just remember that you ≠ grades. You’re in law school for a reason. Remember that reason.

Welcome to the Impending Finals edition of the Law School Roundup, featuring posts by 1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls, each with their own take on how exams ruin the holidays. (Maybe that’s just for me. Some of these posts are just too darn happy for their own good.)

• For the first time.
  • 2L Wannabe
  • the law according to [josh]
  • Law School Dilettante
  • Legal Spanking
  • PT-LawMom
• Doing it again.
  • A little fish in law school
  • The War of All Against All
  • Who Owns the Fox?
• Almost done with it.
  • Above Supra
  • Cella Bellum
  • Frequent Citations
  • La Mitotera
  • Lag Liv
  • Magic Cookie
  • My So-Called Internet-based Life
  • Peanut Butter Burrito
  • Thrown for a Loop

And that’s it! Look for the next Roundup at Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground, and then back here in two weeks, for more exam-time fun.

The weather is gross.

I had five overripe bananas in the freezer.

So I made banana bread.

Grandmother’s Banana Bread

1 cup shortening
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp baking soda in 1/2 cup hot water (stir)
3 cups flour
2 cups mashed banana
1 tsp salt
1 cup nuts (optional)

Mix ingredients in order.^[1]

Pour into three greased coffee cans. If you don’t have coffee cans (I don’t) baking crocks will work fine. I have two crocks that are slightly larger than a coffee can, so I only make two “loaves.” You can use loaf pans—I think the recipe makes about 2 loaves, but I’m not sure, since I haven’t made this recipe in loaf pans in about 15 years. I highly recommend using coffee cans if you can—the ridges on the sides of the can make an excellent slicing guide, for perfectly round, 3/4″ thick slices.

Bake 1 hour at 350˚ if doing three cans; 1 hour and 15 minutes if using two crocks, and probably an hour or so for loaves.

My grandmother has been making this banana bread forever‚ and everyone in my family makes this recipe, too. It’s foolproof and excellent and it is so quick and easy to make. Start the oven preheating, then get to mixing, and by the time the batter’s done, the oven should be hot.

The only problem is letting the loaves cool enough to eat them.

1. Beat shortening in stand mixer.
   Cream sugar with shortening.
   Mixing on low-medium or so, add eggs, one at a time.
   Add vanilla.
   Turn mixer to low. Heat 1/2 cup hot water, then add 2 tsp soda and stir; pour into the batter. Batter will be runny.
   With mixer still on low, add flour, one cup at a time.
   Add mashed banana.
   Add salt.
   Stir in nuts, if using. ↩

When the weather gets really gross, that’s the time to hunker down at home with hot tea and Get Things Done.

Of course that means I went to a small pre-exam shindig last night, and will be going to a birthday dinner tonight. Sigh.