Oh, law school...

After my neighbor's holding (or, to be more precise and avoid crash blossoming maniacally before even getting started, her version of the court's holding in the case we are discussing) is scribbled diligently across the whiteboard in broadly emblazoned lower-case, a pregnant silence falls over the room. We expect the teacher to play his part in the strict script he has written for us. A second later, he should ask my neighbor's neighbor to level a critique. She will then stumble around and offer some minor commentary, perhaps involving the placement of a comma or the insertion of a new modifier that makes the holding ever more narrow, precise and gosh-darned long-winded. Instead he looks ponderously at the holding, then to the book; then through the book. Seconds turn to minutes. Students begin to fidget and laugh nervously. Did we get the holding *that* wrong?? Did the professor's batteries simply wind-down? Seven eternal minutes past, the script resumes: ", comments?" She inserts a modifier after another four minutes of quibbling about whether it's necessary. He retains a mysteriously sly smile - are we still missing something?? - and asks for other commentary. One suggestion gets shot down. And another. It's going to be highly anti-climactic if this holding is fine... a half hour later, apparently the holding was fine and the awkward pause was just an awkward pause. Rinse and repeat and the next case is finally dissected and the holding scrawled for class view. Throats are cleared, whispers wind through the room, the microphone picks of shuffling papers and the light sound of breathing. Eventually the next student will be called on and her voice will count as far too timorous to be heard - while we can hear her, the professor will follow yet another part of his script and mutter "what, what..." and "I'm not following you" many times cutting her off before she can begin.This class has officially turned itself into a Harrold Pinter play: more ellipses than dialogue.

Before this class, I met with the clerkships director. I'm quite curious which faculty members recommended me at this pont, since apparently her contacting me was based on personal recommendation as opposed to any data mining about GPA's, etc. Anyways, my take-away is that by neglecting to join a law journal, I have officially shot myself in both feet and possibly a kneecap or two, and might as well just drop out now and return to paralegalling (and sometimes, I really do wonder what exactly prompted me to want to move beyond that, since my short experiences of garnering some extra cash turning paralegalish tricks at my mom's office have often accompanied an overwhelming sense of relief), probably for a local Denny's, because Denny's is where one always ends up when one strives for academic excellence and misses the mark. I exaggerate, but apparently clerkships are twice as competitive as they used to be due to the down-turn in big law that once was fielding some of the rabid ivy-league overachievers and if I'm interested in obtaining one I might want to form three or four deeply personal relationships with some of my professors, ascend to leadership positions in five or six clubs, claw my way onto a law review, and get perfect grades for the rest of my law school career. Oh and for insurance, I might want to arrange for mysterious accidents to occur to any of the gunners who might beat me out when the class rankings are finally released once it's far too late to change your application focus.

It's been one of those weeks at the ole' law school. I don't know what it is about long weekends, but they are motivation murderers. I latently began this week with an overwhelming and utterly unplaceable sense of failure - that way you should feel only after having been relentlessly humiliated in class and yet I'd come to class highly prepared and otherwise accomplished. I think it just rears up sometimes. Later I discovered that despite an expected A, I recieved a B+ in Fundamentals of Healthlaw. I had accepted that A's were out of reach - due the high level of LLM students (read "ex-attorney graduate school people who know more about the law than the teacher, usually" and a couple of strategic misteps in study strategy). Naturally this reaffirmed that it was all hopeless!! I'm no on a journal, I don't have a summer associateship lined up, and now my 3.8 GPA may experience an irresistable undertow towards - gasp - a 3.78... OMG why do I get out of bed in the morning!?!Then of course my revelation that the diminishment in our winter break was not actually bought at a much needed enhancement of spring break; only one week is incidentally a cruel joke as it isn't long enough to recover from finals and most people come back just as dead as they were before the break. Add to that some major obstacles to my first major mediation coming up. So altogether, it was a bit of a burn-out week for me. This is to be expected, of course - one of the cyclical aspects of law school that we're primed to expect. Sometimes you just have to keep your head down and barrel through weeks like this.

School aside, it's been a good week, but I could probably do with some kind of motivational movie about lawyers making a difference about now. I hear that's super helpful for the 2L doldrums