One week down, ten to go...? Something like that.

I am back in the Law School saddle (having assumed all potential risk and released the LS horse-rancher from any potential liabilities regarding said saddle riding, but I suspect I might have them on some sort of violation of my reasonable expectations contract of adhesion unforeseeability of damages resulting from... um my metaphor is getting stretched thinner than tissue paper... and I will sue for the resulting damage to that tissue paper damnit!).

It feels strange to be a 2L, the middle child of the Law School family (horse family? Cattle rancher family? Lord knows how many metaphors I can mix). First years are coddled a bit, fussed over and obsessively hand-held. Third years are heavily supported with the whole bar exam thing and get to feel awesome even while experiencing simultaneous "oh crap there are no jobs and the bar is coming up" panic and serious senioritis. We 2Ls are just kind of set-free to take whatever classes we inadvertantly signed up for in our 1L panic last spring.The cool thing about this is that my classes were handpicked by me even if I didn't have any idea what I was doing while handpicking them. They include some health law classes populated partially by us Law Students and partially by school of public policy and LLM students - the overarchieving step children of the law school horse-ranching-tissue-paper family. Now is unsurprisingly a very interesting time to be taking health law classes, what with all the goings on in DC, so this is pretty fun even if I'm sure the workload will eventually end me up needing to experience some of that there healthcare firsthand.

I'm also taking some kind of more touchy-feely role playing type classes: namely interviewing and counseling and mediation (we don't get inflicted on real clients until we can play lawyer/3rd Party Neutral nicely - and no, sadly, lawyer/3rd Party Neutral isn't anywhere nearly as dirty or fun as playing doctor, I'm afraid to say). This will be good when it all feels like too much. Mediator types probably give hugs.

Oh and I've one class that's required before we graduate about professional responsibility (I guess they decided conflating lawyer and ethics was just too much for the general public). In a week from Monday we have a test of three actual bar exam ethics questions that are to be graded like real bar exam questions. The teacher suggests that it's likely the majority of us "won't pass" this test. Too bad it's 30% of the grade (and one of few times when the grade has nothing to do with a curve. C'est la vie.

I've been leaving the laptop as home as much as possible. This is advantageous in terms of climbing the hundreds of stairs between me and my final destination (I've been parking by the gym, which makes the likelihood of me working out much higher but has the side effect of requiring some basic mountain climbing skills to reach the side of campus where the law school is) and because I do study and listen better when I am using a notebook. Given that my few tests are all closed book, the ability to cut and paste an outline is no longer particularly desireable and not being able to check my email compulsively seems to be a good thing. Of course it cuts my internet time considerably since I usually have buckets of studying to do when I get home as well. Poor internet. I miss you so. Still, good experiment.