surviving first semester

it’s been a little more than two months since i last wrote. unfortunate for my ever-growing and demanding fan base – but truthfully, if i were to write my day to day trials and tribulations, you would think i was completely uninteresting and i guarantee you would lose any interest in reading this after the first week. basically what i’m trying to say is, i don’t update for YOUR own good.

where to begin? how about with an analogy of my personal growth. i think i’ll use the ever popular “ogres are like onions” from the animated classic, shrek. however unlike shrek; in the case of law school, where everything is always unpredictable, we’re going to say that as a student in august i began as whatever you find at the center of an onion. that weird little bulbus thing. as the weeks go on, you begin to add layers, hence the onion. you start to learn the ropes. what classes you need to complete detailed briefs for, what classes you can get away with just highlighting/book briefing, you make friends who share notes, you form study groups that meet but quickly go off topic because it’s more fun to discuss your professors and come up with ridiculous hypotheticals, and more and more. these add layers and build you up until you become more comfortable with where you are.

i’d say right now i’m probably a white onion, one of those medium sized cooking types you really don’t know what to do with. the way i see it, this is a great analogy because by the time i reach my full growth for the semester, which will be around finals, we can assume that i will be the size of those huge purple onions. what makes this really fitting is, those onions are so big they’re bursting. they’re ready to be chopped up. what better time to feel like you’re being minced into tiny little pieces than finals? oh, don’t forget the fact that when you cut into one of these things, they make you cry. you don’t want to cry, you don’t really know whats actually making you cry, but there you are, balling your eyes out over a vegetable. from what i hear, finals are pretty rough. similar to cutting onions.

with that out of the way, i’ve made friends. i’d like to emphasize the importance of that. as much as you strive to be your own person and fight your way to the top of the class, you’re going to find yourself completely stressed out and looking for any type of affirmation that what you’re reading and attempting to comprehend is actually on the right track. besides, friends make going to class so much easier. if you end up getting called on(oh no! not that bad), they’ll either bail you out by raising their hand if you’re left stammering on about something nonsensical, or they’ll be there after class to tell you how you handled it better than they would have. or if you’re me, you rag on them for how funny it sounded when they had no idea what they were talking about.

another thing i’ve noticed is the decline in my ability to communicate. it’s almost as if i have writers block of the mouth. i don’t know if it’s all the convoluted language constantly being tossed around in cases and from the mouths of your professors, but it started taking a toll on me. maybe it’s not law schools fault at all. maybe it’s my own psyche telling myself to put everything in laymans terms because it makes life easier.

alright, thats it for now. once you’ve spent a day in class and then an extra 3 1/2 hours in the library, the last thing you want to do is talk about school.