More Stamina Is What I Need Up in Here

So now exams are over, and I've somewhat surfaced. It's not really that much of a relief, though -- the actual drowning has been replaced by feeble water-treading while I feel the inexorable downward pull of the NEXT crushing deadline. Or two, actually: I have a huge cite-checking assignment AND about fifty pages of heavily-footnoted text to generate before the end of Christmas break. Whee! This is so fun, y'all.

Pretty much, what I've learned so far is that (a) I suck at law school when I'm miserable (see: most of last year), and (b) I'm fucking AWFUL at it when I'm happy (see: most of this year). I mean, I still prefer happy, and things are infinitely better than last year regardless of my performance. And actually I don't think I'm doing worse, substantively speaking. But man, I'm tired of it.


Ok, in fairness, I'm operating under maybe a little sleep deficit here. And by "little," I mean "borderline hallucination-inducing." Also, I've been living on Diet Coke and cigarettes for the past two and a half weeks. So there might be a tad more Eeyore in the previous two paragraphs than the situation in fact warrants.*


Anyways. Going home today. Good times. Perhaps next time I'll actually tell a funny story or something. I doubt it will rise to the level of actual Solace and Sentence, but hey, there's always hope.



*Wait, hold on -- Eeyore's a pimp. More Eeyore is always good.

...glug...

"Oh...and is curling up into the fetal positition and sleeping a lot a normal symptom of law school finals?"

YES. Often accompanied by feeble sobbing.

Last one is tomorrow morning. Totally effed. Massive paper is due Wednesday afternoon. Up the ass on that one too. But there's Wild Turkey waiting for me after.


Went to confession tonight, though. Yay. More on that once I claw my way to the surface. Prayers, yes?

"UND-ah PRESH--ah!!"

...is a little duet that my bile duct and my stomach lining are singing right now.

My brother and my dad spent a recent evening (possibly a couple of evenings) setting up a WiFi network at our house . Predictably, this resulted in what may be the most egregiously scholarific set of network authenticators ever compiled. I wish I could list them in their glorious entirety, since come on, the signal doesn't even make it outside of the house, but they'd probably get all shirty about it. Suffice it to say that they managed to hit up Alaric the Visigoth, famous catchphrases from Augustine's Confessions, and half a line of the Iliad. In Greek.

Well, ok, it may be funnier if you actually know my dad and my brother. Because I can just see them sitting there, wrestling with the network settings, all profanity and classical references. Anyways. I miss home. Technically, I can go home in like 10 days...but I've got a fuckload of big scary projects to do over Christmas break, so I'll probably have to stay here for a while. Not that here is bad; it's pretty awesome, in fact, what with the apartment and the roommate and the boy. But I'll be under pressure the whole time, because there's this huge-ass paper that I need to finish (it's technically half-done, but really it's more like two-thirds to go), and a massive cite-checking project, and I have to get both of them done during Christmas break because I sure as fuck don't have time to work on them until then.

Speaking of "until then," I'm up to my ass in exams right now. Holy shit, there is so much I have to get done in the next 10 days, before I even get to Christmas break. One exam done (didn't go well at ALL, but fuck it, it's over), two more regular exams, a take-home exam (requiring 12 consecutive hours), and a 6000-word paper to (mostly) write, all before December 13. If I concentrate, I can actually feel my stomach start to produce more acid as I'm reading those words.

So basically, I'm utterly fucked, especially since I've never been more paralyzed in the face of looming obligations. If I were magically transformed into the passive voice incarnate, I'd still be more take-charge and go-get-em' than I've been for the past couple of weeks. But today's been better. I've actually gotten concrete work accomplished on a couple of things, and I've got hopes that this trend will continue. Lord knows it needs to. Sigh.