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 It's not really that much of a relief, though -- the actual drowning has been replaced by feeble water-treading while I feel the inexorable downward pull of the NEXT crushing deadline.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.

We're all so alike it's scary, in my family

Yesterday, after a massive Thanksgiving dinner, we spent a good two hours shrilly discussing the spiritual and temporal faults of basically every vague acquaintance we've ever encountered. Right after that, we spent two and a half hours silently weeping while watching It's A Wonderful Life.

We are nothing if not mercurial.

Return of the Prodigal: Still in Love with the Parenthetical Aside

Hey, so I spent the summer in Prague, did I tell you? No, of course I didn't, because I haven't posted since the middle of July, for fuck's sake. I don't know what was wrong with me, seriously. I mean, yeah, I've had shit to do. This semester has been the hardest I've worked in my entire life (and yet strangely I'm still fucked, now that exams are two weeks away), not to mention the fact that I'm now dating a boy (eee!), i.e. in an actual healthy relationship, which also requires some time and effort exerted. (Who knew?) But anyways, none of that explains why I've all-of-a-sudden gotten the urge to post again now, with finals bearing down and a 6000 word paper to pretty much get done this weekend (and another huge-ass paper to do over Christmas break, and a major cite-checking assignment also to do over Christmas break, and...ok, inhale). Oh hey-- I think I just answered my own question. This is always how it worked in college, too; most of my nerdy little journal entries were written on paper weekends, in between pounding my head against the keyboard because I couldn't make myself focus on the Ethics or the Summa or whatnot. Also between bouts of throwing up my hands all "Who wants to go DRINK?!?" and heading to K-stein or wherever; I don't know when I found time to actually write the papers. But they always got done.

Damn. At most about 2000 words to write per semester, no research to do, and only one book to consult (hello, Joe Sachs). Man, I wish I'd appreciated that more at the time.

Ok, anyways, I originally titled this entry "Tales from Prague," but clearly navel-gazing won out yet again. I'll probably get bored and write-y again this weekend -- I really am going to try to update regularly again.

Oh yeah, also I'm gonna put some more pictures up on Facebook, from this summer and so on. That whole thing has really taken off -- when I signed up on there like a year ago, hardly anyone from TAC was on there. So it was good for stalking my law school classmates, but I don't know them well enough for it to really be interesting. Now everyone's on there. Facebook is officially the New Blogging. Less trainwrecky, but more participants.

All right, all right

Let's see if I even remember how this thing works...

The hiatus ends NOW

Ok fuck this shit, I am going to post again. Yes. Dammit. Anways. Prepare yourself for several posts in which I combine "What I Did On My Summer Vacation"-type newlettering with heretofore undreamed-of levels of introspection. Because this is my blog, where it is All About Me.

So yeah. Life's been marching on. The first two weeks of May I had exams, which were not all that bad, amazingly enough. I can't even express how much difference there was between this time and the two and a half weeks of dark bloody hell first semester. Not that it was, like, a walk in the park this time. It was two weeks of pretty much continuous labor, punctuated by occasional three-hour sessions of super-intense typing while my body released all the adrenaline in its possession (aka the actual exams). The whole two weeks, I basically consumed nothing but Gatorade, energy bars, and half-assed banana smoothies (take a sixteen ounce cup. Mash half a banana therein. Pour in vanilla yoghurt and milk. Mix; consume). And I didn't eat very much of that stuff, even, given that somewhere near the beginning of the experience I developed the Canker Sore of the Century on the inside of my cheek, right beside my next-to-last molars. It measured a full centimeter across at its worst, and believe me I wish I was exaggerating there. While I had the canker sore I also thought I was developing cavities in the upper and lower molars on that side, and also that the joint in my jaw was going to fucking disconnect from my head, it hurt so bad, but it turned out later that these symptoms were just the pain of the canker sore radiating all over that side of my head. Man, that fucker hurt. So eating was basically an entirely medicinal activity consisting of trying to get enough calories into my stomach without letting them touch the inside of my mouth with their assorted sugars and (ohhh the pain) acids.

Then came the last day. Last motherfucking final of the accursed first year. I was just completely drained afterwards, as was everyone. Didn't have much of the "oh fuck this let's start drinking NOW" of the end of last finals. Maybe because it went so much better this time; last time was fucking bleak despair that means all you can do is be inordinately filled with empty jubilation that just at least it's over, at least you get a few weeks rest from fucking it up.

But this time after the last exam I had a different feeling. Calmer, less frantic. I was tired, and I did have the kind of adrenaline-letdown exhaustion that makes your mind go all quiet and blank and your movements slow down. But it was peaceful, at least somewhat. Because I knew: this time I'd done the best I could, or at least much closer to it. That's a misleading way to put it; "the best that I could" is said in many ways. I did the best I could first semester, too, in the sense that I sure as fuck tried as hard as I could. But the whole time, I had this despairing knowledge that trying as hard as I could wasn't doing any good. Like being stuck in neutral, or one of those dreams where all your motions are agonizingly slow. But this time was different. It wasn't perfect. I've still got a long way to go; there's a learning curve to knowing how to use your will once it actually has something approaching effective control over you. But still...the difference was like night and day, or like a dream and waking.

But so anyways. I did go out that night, and ended up having a really good time. I don't hate the other law students; they're way different from me, yeah, but that doesn't mean they're bad people. Or even people that I have nothing in common with, especially when we're all getting pleasantly intoxicated together after finals. So it was a really good night.