divine angst

I am pretty sure, right now, at this very moment, that I am going to fail the bar. I have been doing a lot of focused studying in the last few days, and sometimes I feel good about where I am, but mostly I feel just miserable. I am doing DEPLORABLY on my practice MBE questions. I am doing just so-so on my practice essays, and definitely not good enough to outweigh the serious deficiencies in my MBE scores. And the worst part is that I honestly do not know how to improve this situation. I have been doing mixed sets of questions—mixed subject and mixed difficulty—with the Bar/Bri Study Smart software, but now I wonder if I should instead be doing single-subject, single-difficulty sets. I write down the nuance-y things in the explanations that caused me to get a question wrong, because writing it down generally cements things in my brain, but it’s just not working lately. And the worst part is that, at least half the time, when I look at a question where the answer depends on making a judgment call about the facts, I genuinely—and usually strongly—disagree with the explanation for why my cast on the facts is “wrong” and Bar/Bri’s is right.

What should I be doing? I seriously thought I was in trouble with the essays—having done several over the last few days, I’m not as concerned as I was (though I’m definitely not done doing practice essays…not by a long shot, especially if that’s where I have to pass the bar), but now I am deeply distressed over my MBE performance. DEEPLY. Should I be doing the released questions? Are there other resources I’m not using right now that I should be? What should I be doing right now to improve?

I’m sequestered today, reading through the two subjects that I am least strong in—Commercial Paper and Secured Transactions.^[1] After hours staring at the repetitive string of words in the Secured Transactions mini review outline, I have finally decided to just give up on nuance and try to remember the biggest rule: between two perfected interests, if you file first, you win. EVERY TIME. Unless you happen to be trying to take back a stereo that you sold to some guy who then sold it to his neighbor. But hey, that’s just fair, right?

So I’ve now done one Commercial Paper essay (not as bad as I thought), attempted another (didn’t even understand the call of the question), one Secured Transactions essay (not bad), and a combined Commercial Paper/Secured Transactions essay (one call, not bad, one call OK, one call, a complete FAIL). I’ve also eaten a healthy lunch (pasta with red sauce and a salad), an Almond Snickers, finished off a thermos of coffee and half a Coke Zero, and I’m about ready to take a break. Except that I’ve been taking breaks all morning, and at some point in the next [oh GOD I am not even going to write the number here because it is TOO depressing] days, I have to figure out how I am going to get through 8 hours of essay writing WITHOUT breaks to check my feed reader or change my Facebook status.

In other words, stress usually makes me MORE focused except, apparently, when it comes to the bar exam, when it makes my brain go completely off the rails. I’ve never asked a doctor to examine me for adult ADD, but maybe I should have—I hear Adderall helps with this sort of thing?^[2] I guess I just have to plow back in. Which means I think I’m going to pull myself out of my sequestration—but leave my computer behind—and go read something like Trusts or Wills without the temptation of the internet.^[3]

1. I hear the lecturer and the mini review outline for these subjects in other states is not so bad, but in My State, the lecturer was NOT good and he wrote the mini review outline, so it’s not good either. This, my friends, blows. ↩
2. I’m really just kidding, MOM. I swear. Tempting though it is. ↩
3. Bonus: I will stop having to see my non-bar-preparing friends’ Facebook status messages that talk about getting margaritas after work or weekend trips away. I hate all of those people. ↩

People, you have GOT to STOP posting things about the new season of Project Runway! I cannot and I mean CAN NOT watch it until after the bar, and I would like to develop my OWN opinions on the designers and the challenges, and I CAN NOT do that when you are all jammering away about them!!!

‘k thx bai.

I’ve done about 150 mixed-difficulty MBE questions today, in between close reading of Con Law and Crim Law (oops, I forgot to read Crim Pro, got to do that tomorrow).

Here is how I feel:

more cat pictures

On my flight on Monday, I reached down at one point to grab my bag from under the seat in front of me. But my bag got caught and my hand slipped from the handle and SLAMMED into the bottom corner of the tray attached to the next seat. The bottom corner of the tray looks something like this:

. . . except not in the open/down position. Note the metal hinge there. I show you this because I now have a bruise exactly the shape of that metal hinge ON MY HAND. And, delightfully, that bruise happens to be RIGHT where my pen rests when I write. As I happen to do when I’m taking notes in bar class or writing out my handy, colorful “big picture” outlines for the MBE. (The bruise is also where my chopsticks sit when I eat with chopsticks, as I did for lunch today.)

I tried to take a picture but, as you can see, you can’t really see the bruise. So just trust me. It hurts.

With two weeks left until the bar exam, I am in hyper-study mode. I’ve filled in the next six days on my calendar with a very unrealistic study schedule—three subjects a day, interspersed with mixed MBE practice and MBE subject essays!—and I’m sequestering myself from all human contact except with Mr. Angst and the bag-check people at the public library. (They are gonna love seeing me haul my giant Bar/Bri books out of here every day. Maybe if I wear my Bar/Bri ID around my neck they’ll just wave me on?^[1]) Oh, and we have a wedding to attend this weekend, too, but the groom and almost all of our mutual friends are lawyers, so if I huddle in a corner repeating “MY LEGS, MY LEGS, is the G for Goods or Guaranty? Is the S for Surety or Sale of goods?” over and over, they will all at least know what’s going on and maybe bring me a plate of food or a drink.

Note that I’ve only filled in the next six days and that I called my schedule unrealistic. I am not stupid, people. First, I left the remaining 8 days unscheduled so I can roll the subjects I don’t get to over into next week and weekend. And I know I’ll need the rollover because, hello! Three subjects a day? AS IF. However, if I can get the basics down as quickly as I hope I can, I plan to spend the second half of next week doing nothing but essay after essay after essay, breaking only for mixed sets of MBE questions. And maybe to eat some food.

In other words, I’m in cram mode. See you on the flip side.

1. And by the way, I know they gave us a handy lanyard to wear our IDs on, but folks, if you’re actually still wearing the thing, I should tell you that you look like a bit of a doof. It’s OK—we’re all under serious stress, after all—but you might consider just carrying it in your pocket or purse. ↩

Over the weekend, Mr. Angst and I took the Amtrak round trip to see his family and our new nephew. The trip there was delayed an hour—because the freight lines demand priority on their rails and we had to wait for other trains; the trip back was delayed by three hours, but not because of issues with access—our train hit a pedestrian, who was killed. The tragic nature of the accident couldn’t really wipe away my frustration at being stuck on a train in the middle of our state, but at least it put the whole thing in perspective. After all, I missed out on some sleep (and GOD, I am exhausted today), but someone else died.

Of course, people will be people and people can be shallow and tacky—especially overprivileged teenagers, two of whom kept complaining that they were going to demand a refund of their ticket price, and calling their families to repeat how “ridiculous” the situation was.^[1] At one point, Mr. Angst, who had taken out his headphones to talk to me, looked over and apologized, saying, “I thought it would be nice to talk to you, but I just can’t stand listening to that.” Yeah.

So here it is, Monday, and I had to get up early today (after a scant four hours of sleep) to catch a flight out of town for a day trip. I can barely keep my eyes open, and I am pretty sure (as I head home) that this trip was really pointless.^[2] Still, pointless as this day has been, and tired as I am, I’m still alive. I keep reminding myself of that, and of all the good things going on in my life, and I keep trying to retain some perspective.

1. While the conductors made no explicit announcements about what had happened, we came to a very abrupt stop, immediately after which one of them made an announcement asking for a doctor or a nurse because there was an incident at a gate crossing. None of those facts could possibly indicate anything good. Yes, it sucked. But someone died. ↩
2. The problem with pointless things is that you often cannot know they’ll be pointless till you’ve actually been through them. That’s definitely the case here. ↩

Today, I’m looking at a snapshot of my life for the next (oh GOD) 24 days. To wit:

1. I am sitting on my couch in gym shorts, a law school t-shirt, and wet hair, having no energy or inclination to dress better or use a blowdryer.
2. I am reading an Evidence E&E in an attempt to better understand the hearsay exceptions, since I didn’t take Evidence in law school.^[1]
3. I am surrounded by flashcards.
4. I just ate a PB&J and five Oreos because that was the best I could come up with for lunch.

But for the fact that I’ll have to do these things out of the house for the next few weeks (the bonus of hiring a dog walker is that I feel the need to not be here when he shows up, meaning it’s an incentive to get the heck out of the house), I will probably be in exactly this position every day until the bar exam. I’ll just be in this position in the library or a coffeehouse or something.

1. The jury is still out on whether that was a bad call. ↩

So I’m in the middle of making more flashcards, and I am still liking this form of studying. What I am not liking is this thing called the Multistate Performance Test which appears to have taken up about six hours more of my Bar/Bri time (or would have, had I gone) than necessary.

Folks, it’s a CLOSED UNIVERSE EXERCISE. You read the file and the library, follow the instructions in the “task memo,” and write something down. You only get those 8 handwritten pages in which to do it (or 4600 words characters on the laptop), and you get 90 minutes—that’s an hour and a half. This, folks, is not hard stuff. Sure, practice is important, so Bar/Bri has thoughtfully given us a whole book of prior MPTs with which to practice this exercise. But it’s not something you can exactly TEACH or even learn. You just have to do it. Yet Bar/Bri spends 7 classroom hours on it.

That’s not to say that I would want OTHER Bar/Bri stuff to fill that space; but slicing a day or two off of Bar/Bri there at the end, when the remaining days are limited, would have been awesome.

Back to flashcards.

So, yeah, I was out of town yesterday. I hoped to spend my traveling time consolidating my Bar/Bri notes and maybe making some flashcards. But my flight out was delayed by two hours (two hours!), turning my two-and-a-half-hour stretch of downtime at my destination into . . . no downtime; I literally went from plane to train to taxi to appointment. And on the way back, it was the same in reverse order—appointment to taxi to train to plane. Oof.^[1]

All of this means I was VERY unproductive yesterday (I did get a bit done on the plane, but not as much as I hoped since I forgot to bring the set of notes I was in the middle of consolidating, leaving me to go over Con Law, which, frankly, was not the best use of my time). Today, I’m back to the grind, though having missed yesterday’s (apparently not very useful) Secured Transactions lecture, I’m feeling maybe a bit less overwhelmed than those who DID attend and were freaked out by it. I started to read the Mini Review outline and it was so awful that I decided to put it away and try the long outline before I attend the make-up lecture. (Ah, Sunday Bar/Bri. Joy.)

Right now, I’m busy making the Contracts flashcards I hoped to make yesterday; I really can only do so many before my hand turns into a claw and I have to stop to take a sip of wine, check my RSS feeds, refresh Facebook, or, you know, post something.

1. And of course, I was so stressed out while the delay was unfolding that I could not get any work done, though I started out well—I was typing away up until we got on the plane for the first time. After we had to get off the plane, though, I was not much up for studying, as I was completely freaked out about making it to my destination on time. Yeah, it was one of those delays . . . really vile, in fact, made worse by the fact that we were pulling away from the gate when someone’s mistake caused some mechanical damage, forcing us to pull back in, completely deplane, and wait for a new plane—a plane which was supposed to be someone else’s connection, so I feel bad that those people got delayed as well. ↩

It amazes me that we live in an age where one can fly across the country and home—and manage to get something done in between—in a period of less than 12 hours.

I’m pleased to announce that the student-written portion of the Law School Roundup will be taken over by ImNobody, over at Thanks, But No Thanks. Look for next Sunday’s Roundup over there!

I’ve really enjoyed doing the roundup for the last couple of years! Keep reading, everyone!

I’ve begun making flashcards.

I like it already—I can see that this studying method is actually going to be really useful for me.

That is, if I can get my hand not to cramp up after writing out about twelve cards. I am beginning to dread how long this is going to take me.

So the fear finally sunk in. It’s probably because of the scam that is the Bar/Bri graded essay; I did NOT need to see that “2″ scrawled at the top of my essay, in which I did get two additional issues right, even if the grader thought I wasted time reiterating the rule about injunctions. (But, but, teacher TOLD us to write down the rule!! What do you mean that wastes time?? Teacher said we’d GET points for that!!)

So I’m definitely now a little freaked out, moody, and, oh yes, freaked out. Back to consolidating my notes on Contracts.

I swear, these Bar/Bri lecturers are some of the WEIRDEST people. Today was yet another “What the . . .” day. Even worse, it was full of insane amounts of repetition and weird voices. And I think we get two more days of this guy.

Welcome to my last Law School Roundup. (I’ll be announcing my successor here in a few days.) Enjoy!

• Getting Ready. A (non)Token Minority Law Student
• Working Relationship. 3L Wannabe
• Dealing. Legally numb
• In Court. Mommy on the Floor
• Wildlife. Thanks, But No Thanks
• Advice. The War of All Against All
• Regression. La Mitotera
• Reality Check. Magic Cookie
• Bar/Bri Delusions. Thrown for a Loop

Look for next week’s Roundup at Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground. In two weeks, it’ll be at its new home.

Today has been a good day.

Mind you, it didn’t start out that way—I discovered what I thought was a major snafu this morning (OK, it was a snafu, though it wasn’t as severe as I thought it was). It got me really down and I was, to be honest, really, really unhappy. But then it got fixed, and fixed quickly, and then things rapidly took an upward turn after that.

I’m not going to say more than that, since I can’t really without doing in a fair amount of the last remaining shreds of anonymity that I still have, but suffice it to say that I’m in a pretty good mood.

Finally, a Bar/Bri lecture that was useful, informative, and, frankly, bearable. After two days of “They almost never test this, but here’s the rule anyway,” we finally got a lecturer who gave us informed, frank estimates of how many questions on a given area we’d see on the bar exam—and then spent a proportionate amount of time talking about that given area.^[1]

This may make another Saturday morning lecture bearable. May.

1. It didn’t hurt that he sounded like my relatives, being from my Home State and all. I particularly enjoyed his use of the word “son.” Homey. ↩

As if it weren’t hard enough to get back into reading for Bar/Bri after a four-day break, the power? services? something? in our building went off earlier tonight. Basically, all of the building-central services—cable, the water pump, and general building electricity (elevators, hallway lights, but not unit electricity) just stopped, all of a sudden. I looked out our window and saw two fire trucks right outside the front door of the building and got a little squiffy.

Neither Mr. Angst nor I was content to just switch the TV over to the PS3 and play Rock Band (at least not right away), so Mr. Angst hiked down several flights of stairs to find out what was going on. No one knew what was going on, so he hiked back up the stairs. I cooked dinner, he played on the drums, and we were patient. (Oh, and when I called Comcast to see if we had an outage—I called before we realized the problem was more widespread—I was informed me that our area had had an outage “for several hours” despite my telling the customer service agent several times that we had been WATCHING cable TV only 15 minutes before I called. Sigh.)

Eventually, everything came back on, so we’re watching House and I’m trying to come up with more excuses to NOT read Con Law. (How about, I took it; I took various Con Law-related classes; I have read more Con Law articles over the last year than anyone really should have to . . . . Vote for your favorite excuse in the comments!)

In other news, I made my first in-court appearances today, all by myself (yes, this is allowable under the rule allowing me to practice without a license as a “senior law student or law graduate”). I think both of them went well. One went exactly as it was supposed to and was, if possible, even easier than I thought it would be. The other was . . . not quite smooth sailing, though the result was pretty much what we wanted. Anyway, I got up, held my own, and walked out with good results for my clients. I guess that’s what being a lawyer is all about, so, all in all, it was a good day.

I just spent several hours building clerkship applications in Oscar and printing my cover letters and resumes for non-Oscar judges, only to discover that my resume stated I graduated from college last month. Oops.

Problem is fixed now (reprinting resumes as I type), but what a waste of time!

I’m enjoying my weekend without Bar/Bri. I ran errands yesterday, confirmed a few things on my clerkship applications, drank a margarita, and then got a good night’s sleep. I have several things to accomplish today, but I think I can do them at a leisurely pace, so I’m hoping to continue enjoying the weekend without Bar/Bri. ^[1]

1. I will be doing some practice questions at some point today or tomorrow. I need to get some of those done. ↩

Forget the four day break from Bar/Bri; I need a weekend. Getting my body used to getting up for work every day has been . . . unpleasant. Mostly because I still haven’t gotten my body used to going to bed at a decent hour. And there’s no real reason for me to stay up; I just end up on the couch watching Law & Order repeats or laying in bed reading a book I’m not sure I’m enjoying.

So I’m off to work this morning, and then some administrative errands this afternoon (yay! no Bar/Bri! time to run errands!), but I think I might be taking a nap this afternoon. And definitely sleeping in tomorrow.

Bar/Bri continues apace. Today’s lecture was WAY too long and the lecturer spends too much time repeating the stuff in the notes instead of highlighting the nuance. He is, at least, entertaining. I have given up on the Paced Program for the time being and am instead just trying to keep up with the reading.

Work is heating up—I have four cases on my desk including two court appearances scheduled for Monday, and everyone keeps giving me more responsibility. It’s actually very cool—people seem to trust that I can handle the matters they’re giving me and that gives me confidence that I, well, actually CAN handle the matters they’re giving me.

Also, my last set of grades came in today, which means I can no longer procrastinate on my clerkship applications. This weekend, therefore, is set aside not for doing practice questions but instead for writing cover letters, polishing up my writing samples, and building my online applications. Right now, it doesn’t feel quite real—I’ve been telling myself for months that I’ll send my applications once grades come in; well, grades are in, so I guess have to back that up.^[1]

Oh, and yes, grades are in, which means I am officially done. Even though my degree audit doesn’t actually indicate that I’ve completed my last two requirements, I know I have and I know I’m done. I am officially a Juris Doctor. Hallelujah!

1. I realize this makes it sound like I don’t actually want to apply for clerkships. I actually DO want to apply for clerkships; it’s just the reality of actually having to write the cover letters and get my writing samples ready that I balk at. I think cover letters are just another opportunity to screw up, and as far as writing samples goes, I hate that I have lots of really good stuff that’s either cowritten, and so inappropriate to send, or too long, or not doctrinal enough, or is just too short. I have been looking for that perfect 10-12 page writing opportunity forever, and I have never quite achieved it. Everything I have that length is cowritten or or casual memo. Gah. ↩

So Commercial Paper wasn’t as bad as the outline made it out to be. Which is sort of what I thought might happen—it’s not that the topic is all that hard, it’s just promissory notes and checks and the like, it’s that the terminology used is non-intuitive and confusing. Having it explained by a man on a video screen actually helped a lot.

On another note, I already have a court appearance to make for my summer job. When they told me they’d get me into court a lot, they were NOT lying. Luckily, we have no Bar/Bri lecture on Monday, so I don’t need to worry about any timing issues. Whew!

Off to read about Suretyships. And maybe start on Evidence since I didn’t take that class. Eeek!

Commercial paper is the first subject I’ve encountered where I honestly don’t understand half the words I’m reading. Reading the outline is like reading a overwritten contract, and it makes my head hurt to try and decipher what the hell is going on.

I think it’s probably a good thing it’s only an essay subject, but no less terrifying because of it.