21 months

Since I last blogged, I:

Learned how to walk in heels



Discovered I really love goat cheese and sushi (probably not together, though)



Moved to Salt Lake



Adopted a friend



Became a pescatarian



Was published



Found the perfect banana bread recipe



Forgot how to put in a zipper



Graduated law school, passed the bar, and found a grown-up job



In the next 21 months, I hope I:

Eat tons of goat cheese and sushi (probably not together, though)



Move back to Salt Lake



Adopt lots more friends



(ok, kind of kidding there)

Read a bunch of books



Remember how to put in a zipper



Blog at least once or twice



Finally see Europe



In the spirit of my cousin's inspiring blog post, stop letting fear keep me from being the person that I want to be...

(However, I am perfectly content to let fear keep me from spending a bunch of money for the privilege of jerking around upside down on little elastic cord - no thank you)

The 10,776 Word Monkey on my Back

154 footnotes and it's still not quite done...

But, in 36 hours, with my T&E final over and my paper turned in, I get to take a nap.  SO excited!!!!!

Wrapping It Up

So the advent of March has made me aware of just how lazy a blogger I've become. The hiatus has also made me decide to revamp the blog a little bit - after all, mikeandlashel.blogspot.com should really be about more than LaShel complaining about her homework once every several weeks. So stay tuned for new content and, if I can talk my techie brother into donating an extreme blog makeover, a snazzy new layout as well.

But first, before bringing in the new, we'll wrap up the old. It always makes me sad when I'm reading a random person's blog and they describe a conundrum or an exciting upcoming event, and then never mention it again. So I'll comb through later entries looking for hints on whether their dog ever came back or they got the big promotion at work, but to no avail. My own life is not nearly that exciting, but here are some random updates just in case there's a stranger out there wondering:

I did end up dropping a class - the one taught by the "greatest living legal philosopher" which turned out to be a fortunate choice because he retired a few weeks before the semester started because of health problems and the class wasn't offered after all.

My summer to-do list was semi-successful. I did the write-on and ended up on the Journal of Law, Ethics, and Public Policy, we enjoyed the swimming pool at our complex twice before moving to our new, deluxe apartment, and we traveled everywhere on our list except Washington DC. The writing a novel, watching movies in French, and getting ahead on coursework decidedly didn't, but it was a great summer nonetheless.

The British Museum collection was amazing... Victoria is a beautiful city. In fact, I was so enamored that it was disappointing to find out my legal education is not transferable to Canada.

The Venus Fly Trap, as predicted, died a hasty and inglorious death. I'm pleased to announce, however, that our marriage somehow managed to survive.

Luckily, the IRS, after months of investigation and endless letters, concluded that Mike and I were truly poor enough to not owe them any money. Yay!


Long story short, the special meeting called by the journal wasn't about my lack of morale, but because the elected leader of our journal was suddenly no longer a student at the law school. Speculation as to why continues to abound.

And there you have it! Stay tuned for further exciting adventures :)

The Case of the Missing Casebooks

As anyone who knows me well enough to read this blog probably knows, I love bookstores. In my perfect imaginary world, I would spend two or three nights a week curled up on an easy chair at Borders with cocoa and a new book (and somehow magically not feel guilty about exploiting a commercial establishment with my loitering, merchandise-using, freeloading ways). There is, however, one trip to the bookstore that I generally dread - the one that heralds in the beginning of each new semester. Spending seven hundred dollars on books is my idea of heaven, except when that seven hundred dollars only buys four dense casebooks and their statutory supplements on such enthralling matters as Partnerships, Corporations, and Other Business Associations.

This semester I was able to buy my Federal Tax Law casebook online (saving $70), because the professor kindly informed us of the ISBN for the required text over a week ago. I hadn't heard anything about the other books, though, and deciding that there weren't enough days left to order the books online and have them shipped in time to safely be able to complete my reading assignments before Monday's classes, I headed to the bookstore, warily armed with my credit card and expecting the worst.

I quickly located the section with the law school textbooks (the wall is very easy to spot - laden with hundreds of hard cover casebooks [all around 1500 pages and uniformly bound in impressive shades of blue, red, and black with gold lettering] a quiet shopper can hear those unlucky shelves moaning and lamenting their fate like the damned souls in the Divine Comedy). I began looking through the tags on the shelves, indicating the various classes: Not-For-Profit Organizations, Administrative Law, Federal Courts... After a few minutes, I came across paper-bound books with pictures on the cover and realized I was no longer in the right section. Concerned, I began retracing my steps, peering more carefully at each tag. As before, I did see the Federal Tax casebook on the shelf, but not a hint of any of my other five classes.

Finally defeated (with irrational fears going through my head that every class I had registered for this semester had mysteriously been cancelled) I approached a bookstore employee for help. Somewhat annoyed that I didn't have my course numbers with me, she led me over to a computer and began inputting my professors' names.

"Medieval Legal History?" she asked. "The professor informed us there were no books needed for the course." One by one she looked up all of my classes, and each time informed me the same thing "The system says there are no required texts."

A few hours later, I began to get emails with course syllabi, each one including a message from the instructor that there were no required texts and he (the pronoun evidences my university's gender issues, not mine...all my professors this semester are men) would be emailing us attachments containing our reading assignments each week. So even though it means less impressive-looking tomes to use in torturing my own bookshelf, I think I can live with buying some $2 binders and using my free printouts rather than having to spend money on casebooks. Now I just need to convince my husband that the $700 I had set aside for textbooks should still be spent at a bookstore, on a shopping trip with a more enjoyable purpose :)

Ugh

In one hour and thirty minutes, I will be swept up in an epic battle against a business law final. While at the beginning of the semester, I might have had delusions of obtaining victory, my goal now is merely to survive.

As a self-professed nerd, I'm usually a little bit excited to take tests. While I complain about them excessively and have my fair share of exam anxiety, I'm a bit of a junkie for the thrill. There's something strangely exciting about getting the chance to show off how much you've learned from reading that 1400 page casebook and attending class all semester. This test may be the first one in my life that I've honestly dreaded entirely.

Every self respecting law exam is in an essay format, which gives you a lot more room to show off what you do know, without having to focus too much on the things that you don't. Business Associations, however, culminates in a three hour exam of short answer questions - the cruel kind.

Take, for instance, this sample question from an actual final my teacher gave a few years ago:

"John says shareholders should be glad that, in setting executive compensation, directors are not permitted to be wasteful. What do you tell him?"

The correct answer? "He's wrong - salaries are reviewed under the business judgment rule and will be overturned only if they amount to waste"

Double Ugh...

My "Amazing" Math Skills

Today, while waking up at the crack of dawn, I realized that 7:15 was not 45 minutes before 8:15. My inability to do the simplest subtraction has robbed me of over 5 hours of sleep over the past semester.

Conclusion: I'm going to die in the mandatory tax law class next semester - I've heard the final involves a beastly amount of math, even if you bring a fancy calculator.

At Least I'm Sufficiently Oxygenated

Thursday, 4:41 pm: Get an email from a 3L on the journal, announcing that we have oral presentations on Monday

Thursday, 4:42 pm - 7:07 pm: Proceed to hyperventilate

Thursday, 7:08 pm: After checking the syllabus, all previous emails, and my class notes several times, respond to the email asking what we are supposed to be presenting on, and for how long

Thursday, 7:49 pm: Receive a follow up email, telling us our presentations should run for about 12 minutes, and to be prepared to field questions from professors

Thursday, 7:49pm - 11:00 pm: Proceed to hyperventilate

Friday, 6:30 am: Awake after having a nightmare about forgetting class and missing my presentation

Friday, 11:38 am - 3:25 pm: Spend the day at the law school, studying, attending classes, and having many conversations with fellow students about how unpleasant the presentations sound and complaining about how little notice we were given.

Friday, 6:28 pm: Get an email from another 3L on the journal, announcing that an issue has arisen that requires a mandatory meeting of everyone on the journal (including us 2Ls who have yet to ever see or work on an issue). The meeting is scheduled for Monday, half an hour after our presentations were supposed to begin.

Friday, 6:29 pm: Rejoice, because it looks like our oral presentations will have to be postponed

Friday, 6:30 pm: Fret, because the email never actually says our oral presentations will be postponed. Especially because a professor flew back from London this weekend just so he could attend (and grade) these presentations.

Friday, 6:31 pm: Irrationally decide that a 3L must have overheard me complaining about the journal, and that the meeting is being called to discuss the lack of enthusiasm by 2L members.

Friday, 6:32 pm - Saturday, 9:22 am: Hyperventilate

Plans for the day include more hyperventilating, and preparing my oral presentation because my stomach tells me we'll probably be getting an email soon telling us our presentations have been moved to tomorrow night.

A Ramble Inspired by My Inability to Focus on Fiduciary Duties in Sole Proprietorships

At least five times over the past month (mostly when I was procrastinating homework), I thought to myself "Wow, it's about time that I wrote another blog post." I would then pull up blogger.com, click to open a new post, and sit and stare at the blank box until I got sufficiently bored to return to reading for Business Associations.

At one point, I even looked for blog prompts, but the thought of writing an entire post responding to "What does mayhem mean to you?" brought on some rather severe flashbacks to unpleasant grade school writing assignments. Me, in tears because my hand hurt from gripping the pencil too tightly and my head hurt from not being able to spell anything (at the age of nine, I still frequently used the byline "LaShel Wihte"). My mom, insisting that 20 words really wasn't a monstrous assignment and imploring me to attempt writing a word with more than three letters. As a child, I had so much I wanted to write and so little ability to express myself in writing. Now that I'm an adult, with a decently fast typing speed and a reasonable ability to spell most English words (at least with the help of spell check), all the ideas have disappeared. Well, except for the age-old fall back of writing about how you don't have anything to write about.

I thought that the answer to getting over my writer's block was to have something exciting happen to me, so I would have something to blog about. I was mistaken. Turns out, the best method for overcoming that blank stupor is to be procrastinating something you really don't want to do. Like outlining for Business Associations *blech*

Reasons I Wish I Were Still a 1L

I've decided I'm going to just go back to being a 1L. Why, you might ask, would I want to give up being able to choose my own classes and occiasionally have new students look up to me like I'm smart or important for having finished a year of law school, only to go back to the bottom of the pile?

1. For 1st years, 15 credits involves reading about 180 pages a week. Which takes about 18 hours to get through. For 2nd years, 15 credits involves reading about 300 pages a week. Which, as you might deduce if you have the math skillz, takes about 30 hours a week to plow through.

2. Because of their lesser reading load, plus not being allowed to work, not being on journals, and not having to find a job for after graduation, first year students occaisionally have time to go to the grocery store/load the dishwasher/have brief conversations with their husbands.

3. So far, it seems that a substantial part of the 2L experience is gettting letters of rejection from various firms you were hoping would hire you

4. The busyness, the emerging journal cliques, and the fact that you don't have classes with the rest of your cohorts mean that you never really see any of your friends anymore

5. Getting to choose your own schedule means having to worry about final exam conflicts

6. All those 1L's might look up to you, but they also overrun all your favorite study spots and spend a lot of time complaining about how they have a ridiculous amount of reading. It was much more fun to be the one blissfully comiserating about the 180 pages.

7. 1L orientation is still going on... which means lots of free food (for them)

8. The most important reason I wish I was still a 1L? As a first year, I spent my days sitting in class, hoping I didn't get called on. Totally innocent, normal behavior. As a 2nd year, though, I challenged myself to occasionally volunteer in class, because class participation actually factors into our grades. The problem is, once I started talking, it became really comfortable, and now I'm having a hard time sitting on my hands during class so I don't overvolunteer. It's obnoxious... I spent all of graduate school getting chewed out my teachers for never participating, and now law school's turned me into a gunner. Sounds weird, but I miss my formerly timid 1L self... it was much less embarassing.

Ok, so maybe I'm being a little dramatic. I love my job, I love the journal, and I like almost all of my classes (one class I'm taking only for a graduation requirement wasn't quite as interest grabbing, but it's definitely growing on me). I'd just like 50 hour days (with mandatory nap times, of course), a job offer for next summer, and some kind of muzzle. Ooohh... and some brownies!

Why I Actually Have to Spend Money on Clothes

Today I'm helping with 1L orientation, which should be rather fun. In exchange for 8 hours of volunteering, the law school gave me dinner last night and a free t-shirt.

Dinner might not have been my favoritest, but it was at a pretty classy pizza joint, and it's not the law school's fault that I dislike pizza. The shirt, however...

On the bright side, it's not white or see-through (or even worse, white and see-through). And it's shirt-shaped. And it has a great ND logo on the front. But...

Let's just say the mustard-yellow tent look is not so much for me.

Ill (or at least feeling guilty) over ILL

Normally, I hate to Interlibrary Loan (ILL). It's nothing against the books themselves... they're lovely. I just feel so guilty making the non-profit library spend several dollars of their limited budget on getting a book sent just for me, instead of being able to put that money towards buying new books that lots of people, including myself, could read.

This summer, however, I've had to ILL quite a few books for the professor I'm working for, and I started to feel more comfortable with it. When I discovered a book that I needed for the research I'm doing for him, and found out on WorldCat that there were a dozen libraries in the country that had a copy (as opposed to the book that was only owned by a single library in the Netherlands) I went ahead and ordered it. "I pay tens of thousands of dollars in tuition," I thought to myself in self-justification. "Surely they can spare to spend $2.50 on shipping for a book that's likely to be a goldmine for my research project."

The day after I put in the ILL request for the book, I got an email from the school library saying that none of the other libraries in WorldCat actually had circulating copies. I was somewhat dissapointed, but figured there was nothing I could do about it, and decided to proceed with the project without it. Today, however, as I was running another search through the card catalog, I found out that this library owns the book I requested.

Feeling somewhat dumb and wondering why the librarian hadn't said anything, I went ahead and clicked on it... only to discover that it is still in processing, after having arrived yesterday. So forget about feeling bad about having the library spend three dollars on shipping for a book... I now have a major guilt complex for inspiring the acquisition of a new book, which had to have cost at least 30 pounds (I checked), plus a ridiculous shipping charge from Europe. The worst part is, the book's a 500 page volume, in French, on a narrow topic of European constitutional adjudication, so it's not like anyone besides me is ever going to read it. *sigh*

Summer!

After 2 semesters as a lowly first year student, I'm now officially a 2L.  Unfortunately, unlike levelling up in a video game, this hasn't appeared to give me any special powers or even made me aware of any previously-locked secret areas.  I guess that must not happen until you become a 3L...

My exams went alright(ish).  As mentioned earlier, I forgot about the First Amendment during my Con Law exam.  My Torts exam was so severely word limited that I couldn't really explore any nuances.  The exam I'm most worried about, though, is Property - I started getting a migraine half an hour before the exam, and even though I loaded up on Excedrin when I realized what was happening, I know the first third of the test was consequentially a probable disaster.  But enough about that... there's no point in obsessing now, considering that I won't get my grades for at least 3 weeks (some rumors have even suggested that they won't be in until late June!  I don't think my sanity is that patient). 

Almost as predictable as my impatience for my grades, the end of the semester has also filled me with grandiose plans for this summer:

1. Do the law review write on (of course, this goal might be a little bit easier to accomplish if they actually gave us the packets with our topic assignments - we were expecting them 62 hours ago).

2. Assuming I make law review, start working on research for a note topic

3. Travel (visit Utah, Chicago, Michigan City, the Amish, Canada, and hopefully D.C.)

4. On campus interviews

5.  Try to get a jump-start on coursework for semester

6. Move to a bigger apartment (meaning one that actually has a bedroom).  Furnish/decorate it adorably.  And keep it clean.

7. Write another novel.  Maybe actually let someone besides my mom read it this time.

8. Find a recipe for brownies from scratch that I like as much as the box kind (a surprisingly difficult struggle, to be honest... I've already been working on this one for several months)

9. Read something literary.  I'm not sure what yet... any suggestions?

10.  Watch all my DVDs with the French dubbing on, in a probably-too-late attempt to remember the language.

11.  Start hitting the gym again.  Law school killed all those good exercise habits I built up in grad school.

12.  Actually use the pool at our apartment complex, at least once

13.  Get caught up on movies and TV shows.  Especially want to see Benjamin Button.

14.  Write letters.  And actually mail them.

15.  Take pictures of me and Mike doing all these fun things.  Maybe even blog about it.

And, of course, (16.) work.  This summer is going to be epic.

Random Ramblings of an Exam-Fried Mind

I may be in the midst of the most grueling finals week of my life, but, hey, at least one week from today I'll be free!*

Although, truth be told, as demoralizing as exams are, there's a little part of me that kind of likes the insanity.  If only that little part of me would have chimed in to remind myself about the existence of the First Amendment during my Con Law exam this afternoon...

I had the first Gyro of my life today, and thought it was delicious.  Plus, an excellent excuse to get bakalava... mmmmmmhmmm! 

*Working on a twenty or thirty page paper and an exam on citation forms for the law review competition.

Procrastinating again...

I feel so terrible to be one of those people who created a new blog, wrote a short and senseless post, and then didn't return for months.  It's the virtual equivalent of leaving a baby in a dumpster, without the chance that a kind hearted passerby might intervene.  

That being said, my discovery of my cousins' brilliant blogs (here, and here) gave me the inspiration to give this another try.  Besides, it's that time in the semester again where I am supposed to be spending every waking moment outlining... meaning, of course, that my desperation for new procrastination techniques is full force.

At Eastern Oregon University, all of my classes were online, and none of them had caps.  The result was that I could register for anything I felt like, as long as I made sure that I was getting my GEs.  I was even a Liberal Studies major, which is effectively like majoring in electives.  Probably best of all, EOU was on a quarter system, which meant that I knew that even if I ended up hating a class, I'd only have to put up with it for a couple of months.

When I moved on to grad school, registration became even simpler.  The program was small enough that there were only 6 or 7 classes offered by the department each semester, and most of them were three hour seminars that met once a week.  The chance for class conflicts was basically non-existent, and there were no class caps.  I knew all of the professors in the department well enough to know what to expect from any given class, and 9 credits was considered a full course load.  Again, a very easy experience.

Cue law school.  The first year's registration was simple, because the school took care of it for me.  All of us 1L's had to take the exact same classes at the exact same times, and the registrar just divided us into sections and sent us our schedules.  This week, though, they let us register for classes for next fall, and it was incredibly stressful.  I picked out the classes that I wanted to take, and for the first time in my life, had to deal with scheduling conflicts.  After a good deal of agonizing and nearly an hour spent rearranging pretend schedules, I finally came up with a workable schedule.

The morning of registration, though, they let the current 2Ls register first, and by the time they were done several of the classes I had wanted to take were completely full.  Scrambling for a new workable schedule and rushing to beat my classmates to get seats in the more popular classes, I panicked and registered for 17 credits.  The good news is that none of the classes conflict.  The bad news is that we're only supposed to take 15 credits, and 17 credits (A) is academic suicide and (B) precludes me from any chance of doing a journal next year.

So I have to drop a class :(  Probably soon, because it's not nice to be sitting on class spots in more classes than I need, especially because some of them are now completely full.  But which one?  

The fun class taught by the world's greatest living legal philosopher (according to his Wikipedia page)?  

The class that will look great on my clerkship applications that's rumored to be an easy(ish) A?  

Or the class that's actually relevant to what I think I want to do after graduation?  

(Unfortunately, I'm not letting myself consider dropping the one class I'm actually dreading and would love not to take, because it's required for graduation).

*sigh*  Sometimes, too many options can be such a painful thing.... although at least it gives me an excuse for why I'm not working on my outlines.