The first day

I had to force myself to get up incredibly early after not being able to get to bed before midnight (even with the help of Benadryl). I wanted to work in plenty of slack to shave and get dressed up; naturally suiting up takes a bit more time than throwing on my usual t-shirt and shorts. I was scheduled to check in at my office at 8:30…although driving to Indy from Bloomington only takes roughly an hour, I left at 6:45 to account for possible traffic issues in downtown Indy as well as possible issues of getting lost since I hadn’t been there before (I landed this job through an interview held within our school). Sure enough, I arrive in downtown Indy a good 40 minutes early, and initially thought I overshot a bit. Then traffic got thick really quickly. Then I struggled to find the parking garage we were directed to, making me worry that I was actually going to be cutting it close. Then I finally found it and was turned away by a lady saying the garage was full, which compelled her to direct me to another one. Happily, she gave me wrong directions to an intersection that didn’t even exist. It now became really clear that I was indeed going to be late despite the fact that I had seemingly been cautious; I phoned in and apprised them of my situation before I ever actually got late. Eventually, after arriving to within a few blocks of my office 40 minutes early, I strolled in more than 45 minutes late, agitated as could be. Obviously I apologized profusely, and they did understand (especially given the unexpected parking issues that had plagued others as well). I was assured that no harm was done and that nobody I was working for would even realize I was late since I was just dealing with HR people for orientation initially, but it wasn’t exactly the auspicious debut I had hoped for either. Orientation is what it is. It’s boring no matter where you are, but companies have to do a certain amount of it. By orientation standards, this was an eminently tolerable day. They got most of that stuff out of the way, and midway through the day we were already assigned projects to work on and basically told, “Have at it. Tell me if you have any questions.” There wouldn’t be much else to say, except that a surprising twist took place during the second half of the day. After going out to lunch with a few of my new co-workers (the majority of them being people from my class), I got back to my desk and had an e-mail waiting from the HR Director with the subject line, “Question,” and a body that simply said, “Leif, could you please come to my office or call me when you get this?” Naturally this spooked me since it sounded negative and I had no idea what the problem would be. Not knowing exactly where his office was, I just called him up. After standard greetings (I’ve really liked this guy since he initially interviewed me for the job; it seems that we struck up a really good rapport immediately), he says, “So I don’t want this to be like a bait-and-switch. This is completely your choice and you shouldn’t feel at all pressured into taking this spot.”  He proceeds to tell me that a need for some different kind of work had arisen, and that I was one of the new workers that he wanted to approach with an offer to switch over to it. I told him quite sincerely that the work he described sounded interesting, but since I fully believed both that I was truly free to stay in my current assignment or switch over to this one, and since I also fully believed that he would shoot straight with me, I said, “My one concern is this: given my goal this summer of doing good work, impressing people and hopefully positioning myself in the best way possible for a post-graduation offer…is it really wise of me to leave an established department in the organization that will never go away to do work for a commission that is temporary in nature?” He quickly assuaged my fears on this point. He said that he didn’t want to over-sell the whole thing, but that yes, a number of people high up in the government are behind this project and those who switch over to do this work will be looked very highly upon. He further said that this was high-profile work that most law students wouldn’t get to work on. He also mentioned who would be running point on this operation, and while I’m not going to mention her by name in this blog (due to the fact that a quick Google search doesn’t seem to turn up an association between her and this project within the public record and I want to err on the side of paranoid in respecting confidentiality rules at the office), she is an accomplished lawyer of several decades who has served in prominent federal positions. She also is closely associated with someone who is fairly famous and powerful not only on the state level, but nationally. Not a household name yet, but any avid follower of the news will have at least heard of this person’s associate. Working for her sounded kind of amazing. The HR guy supplied the coup de grace when he flatly stated that if this move didn’t help me a decent bit, it certainly couldn’t hurt me. At this point I pretty quickly asserted, “Okay, yes I’m interested.”

Aftermath

I was basically caught in a state of limbo for the next day and a half, working on projects for my initial department that I suspected would not get done because they were somewhat long-term and I was set to be switched at any time. On Wednesday, the switch occurred, as a meeting was held to further introduce the few of us switched to this project to what we were doing.

You see, when I heard I was working for the aforementioned woman above, I assumed that meant that I was working well beneath her. Actually though, it was just five of us and her in this meeting and it looks at this point as though I’ll just be reporting to her directly. To do good work for her and impress her could really pay dividends, and that actually applies both in the government sector and in the private sector. She actually works for a big firm a couple of blocks down the road in Indy rather than working for the Attorney General; the reason for the overlap is that this project is being worked on together by both her and the Attorney General, and the AG promised to send some help her way. Between just generally strengthening my resume a decent bit, and giving me connections in both the public and private sector, this is exciting stuff and could be a really good break to pave my way toward a good future career.

In case you’re curious, the work I’m doing is for the Indiana Criminal Code Evaluation Commission. The work is basically to evaluate all kinds of things about how Indiana carries out criminal prosecutions. I won’t bore you too much with the details, but it’s basically a potential overhaul of criminal classifications (felony vs. misdemeanor and sub-classifications within those), sentencing guidelines…all kinds of things. If the work we do is adopted by Indiana legislators, then it could have significant influence in this state for decades. While I don’t share many of my fellow law students’ notions of needing to be doing influential work, it’s certainly nice to be able to have a chance to try doing that in this case. I think I’m going to enjoy this work quite a bit.

General thoughts

It’s a cool thing, going and working in the big city. Many of my friends are also working in Indy, and the biggest part of the legal community of the city is consolidated into this downtown area. I met one of my friends working a different job for lunch last week, and I’ve set lunch plans with other friends in different firms for this week. It’s good to have so many of my connections at an arm’s reach. While I haven’t gotten to explore Indy in its entirety, this district is really nice and I like working there so far. That’s a very good thing, since it seems like the most likely candidate at this point for me to set up after law school.

Drew and I take off down the road to Nashville a bit before noon. The drive from here to Nashville is fairly lengthy and somewhat boring, but I threw together a playlist before taking off that we both enjoyed; he is decidedly not a country fan, so I largely left any and all country off the playlist with the exception of the Zac Brown Band. There’s simply no excuse for not liking them unless you haven’t heard them, and there’s becoming less and less excuse to have not heard them as time goes by either. (Link)

First thing we do is beeline to the first Jack in the Box, since we both think it’s the greatest fast food in existence and Nashville (and other equidistant cities like St. Louis) is as close as we live to one. I see when going home that it’s proliferating more and more back in Washington. When we stopped for gas in Kentucky, we were both hungry but refused to satiate our appetites because we wanted to build anticipation for the impending Ultimate Cheeseburger. This was great as always. We then head to our hotel; we didn’t book a nice one, since our entire use of it was going to be to stop off, leave our stuff, and then immediately cab it downtown. We would return really late just to pass out and then get up and leave in the morning, so basically we just chose it based on being an affordable one in a convenient location that was a quick cab ride away from the stadium. When we walked in to check in, sporting our Canucks gear already, there was some crazy-looking old dude sitting out front who glared at us and mumbled “Canucks…” I just walked past him. I thought to myself, “Sir, I’d love to talk trash with you, but you frighten me.” There was a number of shady-looking people hanging around here. As I’m waiting for my turn to check in, my friend leans in and asks me if I locked my car. I was worried that I didn’t know the answer. Perhaps I should have paid a bit more for our hotel room.

The stadium is right at the end of Music Row, so while we tell the cabbie to take us to the stadium, we mention that we’re going to have a few drinks before the game and he drops us across the street from the arena in front of some of the bars. This is about 4:30 local time, and the game starts at 7 there so we’ve got some time to kill. We disembark and head into the first one that attracts us to grab our first beer. We sit down next to two guys in the bright yellow shirts that I’ve seen populating all of Bridgestone Arena during the playoffs. I dig it when sports crowds manage to unify in one color like that, but yellow is sort of an eyesore on TV. Anyway, as we saddle up next to them, the bartender smiles and makes a comment to them, “Better not say anything about Canada…” They look over to see us, and then greet us. One of them says, “We’re actually Canadian.” I laugh and say, “And we’re American. Guess we’re all a bunch of traitors.” (Note: I’m amazed at how much flack I take from my friends for rooting for a Canadian team. Obviously this element doesn’t exist nearly as much in Washington since the Canucks are the closest thing to a home team there.) We chat with them for a bit, but the live singer here sucks so we move on after one beer. At the next one we actually let the bartender talk us into ordering a couple of Molson Canadians. I liked the idea, even though I know I don’t really like this beer. We soldier up and put them away. More chatting with Nashville people. These really are some of the nicest and friendliest people you’ll ever meet…even when wearing enemy colors, it’s incredibly difficult to have a nasty exchange with them. I commented to my friend that picking a fight with one of them would be as hard as that guy in Fight Club trying to randomly pick a fistfight with a priest. For our part, we’re both really easy to get along with in these scenarios too, so hopefully we did our part to give Canuck fans a good name in Nashville (I know that Canuck fans aren’t the most well-liked group generally in the hockey world). One random saw us, was already drunk, and said, “Hey! **** the Canucks.” I just smirk at him and tell my friend that it’s almost a relief to run into one actual enemy fan around here. We head into our third bar, where we end up settling in until gametime. The band here was excellent; played a lot of country, but their countrified covers of non-country songs were great too. Their twangy take on Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls” was great; their country version of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” was pretty funny, even if not actually all that good. (Confession: I like that song as sung by Lady Gaga.)

We head into the stadium and find our seats. We were stationed in the 300 level, directly above the goal where ultimately each of the three goals was scored. It would have been a great view, but one guy in front of us was really quick to stand up the second something got interesting and at times it obscured my view when I wasn’t quick enough to jump to my feet behind him. Honestly, I wish people just stood up all game long here or at least more consistently; I love standing at sporting events and concerts. Sitting feels lame, especially in the playoffs, and I prefer to confine that to timeouts/intermissions. Anyway, we stood up for the intros and the national anthems. We proudly sang along with “O Canada,” playing up the fake role of being Canadians. Charlie Daniels was there to sing the American anthem; he looks downright odd without any kind of hat on, but anyway it was cool to see him sing something live. This being my first game, I really enjoyed taking in the view and seeing the wider angle of all of the action as it developed. The Canucks scored really early to take the lead, to which my friend and I obviously stood up and cheered. We quickly realized that we were VERY alone in this stadium. I couldn’t hear any other pop from the crowd when this happened. Usually there’s a bit more of a visiting presence than that at basically any game. Our only encounter with Canucks fans the entire outing was a couple of them shouting out to us from across the street before the game. Anyway, after leading 1-0, we got on the power play on a penalty that angered the live crowd; we never saw a good angle on replay, so it was tough to tell whether it was a genuine bad call or just something that a live crowd gets idiotically riled up about for no good reason. This became relevant because we scored quickly into this power play to grab an early 2-0 lead. Friend and I stand up and cheer again; a guy behind us says, “****, these guys are happy about this? That’s a cheap goal after a call like that.” I rolled my eyes; yes you idiot, I’m sure you’d be crying in the bathtub over it if your team scored on a power play after a penalty that we never even saw much of an angle on. For our part, we mind our manners in visiting stadiums; we stand up and cheer when our team does well, otherwise we shut up. I figure that’s how visiting fans should act. Given the low-scoring nature of this series and the basic impotence of the Nashville offense, it basically felt pretty strongly for the entire game that a 2-0 lead would probably be insurmountable…and it was, as we skated to the 2-1 win. Definitely a good time.

After the game, we head down the street to a brewery I’d eaten at a couple of months ago to grab a post-victory meal. After this we head into the karaoke bar up the way. We settle in with more drinks as people do songs…I was planning to sing one too, though I got a bit shy when like the first 6+ people that went up were really good. I resolutely told my friend that I was NOT going to go sign up for a song until someone sucked. This made him laugh a couple of songs later when, on cue, I jumped up and headed to the booth to sign up. My turn eventually came and I hit the stage. Before my song started, I said, “Hope you’ll forgive me for the shirt. We can all be friends again now, right?” I was afraid upon saying it that this could come off as arrogant bragging, but my friend assured me that it didn’t and that everyone out at their tables took it in good humor. When I sing, I have an okay voice but a severely limited range (yes, if you’ve heard me sing along in the car, I probably sounded brutal…again, limited range, and even worse when I’m trying to match the key being sung in on a recorded track) so I generally try to stick with songs that have a low register. I did “Summertime Blues” since it stays low and since I can replicate the super low speaking voice on moments like I’d like to help you son, but you’re too young to vote. I requested the Alan Jackson version just because people were mostly doing country here; also it basically doesn’t deviate much at all from the original except that the instruments playing the song are country. Anyway, I did pretty well and the crowd seemed to like it. Drew, too scared to do a song himself, gave me props. We had a couple more drinks, I did one more song (Brooks & Dunn’s “My Next Broken Heart” — Link of Brad Paisley singing it at a tribute show), and we moved along. We tried one place, which was pretty lame, and headed into another. On my way into the next one, a girl stopped me to say something. It was loud and I had to do the “what?” thing twice. Eventually I understood her; she said, “Hey, I heard you singing. You were really good!” I’m very hit-or-miss on singing, and probably more miss than hit, so I appreciated the compliment and thanked her. We took in some more good live music at this place, and after that just kind of called it a night since the city was losing steam around this time (1:30 a.m. or so) on a Monday night. We cabbed it back and passed out on our concrete mattress, ending a very enjoyable outing.

I don’t know exactly where to jump back in, so let me just give an update and then get some reflective thoughts down from the last year and a half that I’ve spent away from blogging.

What I’m up to now

I just finished my 2L year at IU, which puts me a year away from my law degree. In a little over a week, I’ll be starting up my summer job with the Office of the Indiana Attorney General. Hopefully my employer likes me and I like them, and this leads to a long-term thing after graduation. That’s always the hope with your 2L summer job. I kind of fell into this position without expecting to; when on-campus interviews took place in the fall, I sent my resume out to any of them on the list that seemed like an even reasonably good fit for what I wanted. I interviewed with a handful of firms, but it became clear early on that each of those was an extreme longshot. Essentially, each firm was hiring about two people total for the entire summer, putting me up against hundreds of people and giving me almost no hope at all. I eventually began treating them as interview practice, but tired of them and stopped even wanting to go.

The Attorney General’s office was the last OCI that I did, and honestly I forgot about that interview until the morning that it went on. I saw a popup on my Blackberry that let me know that it was happening, at which point I briefly panicked before discovering that my suit was pressed and I could make it. I obviously went in with no prep, and for that matter no anxiety; I was sort of interested in the position, but I’d gotten so used to these OCIs being exercises in futility that I stopped caring too much. However, the tone of this interview was different from the beginning. The interviewer had clearly prepared himself specifically to interview me (unlike the firms, who basically scanned your resume right at the beginning of your interview) and I immediately liked and felt comfortable with him. As he described the job, it sounded like such a good gig that I found myself become increasingly interested. Thankfully I was on my game and gave a good interview, and when offers came out I got one. I’ll be working in their civil litigation department. I’m looking forward to it; law isn’t for everyone, but I think it’s a good match for me, and I enjoyed the work I did last summer for a local circuit court judge.

Thoughts on Indiana

Well, as you probably surmised from my paragraph above, I’m looking to stick around here after graduation as long as I have a job to stick around for…so that’s a pretty good endorsement of my thoughts of the area right away. I like Indiana, and I like the Midwest vibe in general. It’s more of a fit for me than Washington is. I of course love and miss my Washington people, and would be ecstatic if any or all of you moved out this way, but as far as the state itself is concerned…I’m not too determined to move back. I’ll keep coming back to visit of course, and I will stay loyal to my Cougars, Seahawks and Mariners forever, but for the foreseeable future I think that this is where I belong. I love the people. I love that, this being the “Crossroads of America,” I can hop in my car and be in any number of different big cities in four hours or less (Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, Nashville to name a few). I love not having to do math when I see that a game is starting at 4:00 EST. Unfortunately I’m pretty trained on that front and I regularly subtract three hours only to realize my mistake and be disappointed that kickoff is still three hours away; that will pass though.

Honestly, Indiana natives will ask me, “Are you nuts? You left Washington to come here?” Maybe in their position I’d say the same. To be clear, it’s not that I think that Indiana is a better state than Washington; I just think that after spending more than 25 years in one state, it was time to branch out and try something else. I can honestly say, though, after two years here, the novelty hasn’t worn off. I genuinely just like living here.

Thoughts on law school

I’m tempted to just call it a means to an end. I like the taste of legal work that I’ve gotten, and while school has largely become a grind, it will lead me where I still believe as firmly as ever that I want to go. But honestly, that’s only my opinion of the school part of law school. Thankfully, even with as much work as we have, there’s a lot more to life than that (outside of the final few weeks of each semester, anyway).

Law school can be downright hellish at times, and that much is etched in my recent memory since this recent finals period was particularly difficult. With that said, to stand back from it and give a fair assessment, I think that the fairest way that I can assess my overall opinion of it is this: as 2L draws to a close, graduation already feels far too close. Yes, there is a lot of hard work. Yes, there is the occasional miserable all-nighter. But, quite frankly, the thought of this whole law school thing ending actually does make me sad. I’ve had a great time here in Bloomington, I’ve made lots of close friends, and it will be hard to say goodbye to many of them when we scatter. Thankfully, if I stay in Indiana, there should still be a decent number of them in my general vicinity, so I won’t be totally starting over socially again, but I love the crew here and am in no hurry to see it disbanded. Time really flies; it’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been here for two years already.

Anyway, those are some general things, but I think that I’ll get into a more detailed recap to catch any interested parties up on my last year and a half. It won’t exactly be the tedious blow-by-blow level of detail that I gave to my recap of my first semester, but I’m sure that I’ve got plenty of stories worth telling. So, I guess I’ll press post on this and at least start up on writing some of that. I hope that I’ve still got a few interested readers out there.

Thankfully, the whole process was far less difficult and painful than I was expecting. A county circuit court judge sent me an e-mail that sounded like he was basically willing to hire me sight unseen, assuming that I was okay with not being paid. I talked to him over the phone soon after, and he did end up offering me the spot without even having met me in person yet. He said I could set my own schedule, do research work from home if I wanted to, and that he would give me plenty of input into what area of law I’d want to work on for my cases. Also, and this was vital, he said that the work should provide me with a good writing sample that I can use in future interviews. I was quite surprised to get all of this done from Washington, but I managed it and it’s nice to have my summer work lined up before the semester even starts…it will happily provide me with one less thing to worry about.

The new semester starts Thursday. I’m sure that before long I’ll become too busy to blog regularly again, but I have every intention to complete a journal of this coming semester as well when all is said and done. This is one of the most important years of my life, and I’ll be happy to have a detailed account of it later.

Unlike the previous exams, I knew in this case that I couldn’t take the rest of the day off. I grabbed lunch with my study partners, then had to hit crim pro hard. I kept on telling myself that I would work ahead to crim pro during my other studies, but it simply didn’t happen (I spent maybe a couple of hours on it two weeks before, but that was all). Procrastination is very much part of my nature…my undergrad GPA more than reflects that. I’ve fought it off reasonably well during law school so far, but it still seeps in sometimes.

Basically, at this point, I had no outline whatsoever for crim pro. Outlining for a class that doesn’t allow you to bring the outline into the exam only has utility in that it’s a really good learning tool to write down concepts to commit them back to your memory from when you first heard them in class and put them in your notes, but I still felt that I was woefully behind. I had barely read for this class, and was starting on my outline about 48 hours before the exam. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right?

Honestly, it didn’t turn out that badly. As I wrote things down into my outline, they quickly committed themselves back into my memory. I was better in crim pro at constantly paying attention to the professor than I was in a lot of classes, and most days I took good notes. That much paid off nicely here. One of the reasons I had stopped bothering to read is that past students of this class basically advised me that all that really mattered in it was to pay good attention in class and take good notes. I would have to say, now that the exam is behind me, that they were pretty much spot-on.

Maybe I wasn’t quite as prepared for this exam as I was for crim law, but I felt okay going into it…and as I began reading through Hoffmann’s fact patterns (starring Forest Panther again), I once again felt the calm of seeing that I had plenty that I could type about. I felt like I wrote another really solid essay section. He also employed a short answer section on this exam, and unlike the last one I was able to write out full answers on all 10 questions. One of the questions partially stumped me, but I thought I might know the answer so I made a go at it. I looked it up later and largely got it wrong, but I might be able to bid for more than a single point on it…time will tell.

In any case, I felt that the exam went remarkably well, and I expect at least a B+ with the potential to fluke into more. I smiled as my exam uploaded, and enjoyed the great feeling that not only was I done with my first full semester of law school, but I could reasonably hope for a good set of grades upon release.

With our finals out of the way, a few friends and I went across the street to the office of our LRW secretary, who had final memos available for us to pick up in a sealed envelope. My friend Justin said, “Maybe I should wait until I get home to open this.” I rolled my eyes and said, “Hey Justin, spoiler alert: you passed.” It was a P/F course and I just refused to sweat it. At that point, I opened up the envelope and discovered that…wow, my LRW prof really hated my final memo. Okay, so based on effort, I deserved a poor grade (and really, I do stand by my decision to prioritize my graded classes in my studies over a P/F class), but to be honest I’ve gotten cocky over time as profs have just never given me bad grades on papers regardless of my effort…so it did temporarily surprise me. In any case, I’ll pass the class, so I couldn’t sweat this for long; it was time to head to the bars with my friends, to celebrate the end of our first semester. I could deal with my technical deficiencies in my legal writing later. I very much believe in my ability to write, so I know I can

I’ll go ahead and throw out my predictions for what grades I’ll get. Naturally this is a little bit futile to post since I won’t post what I got when it happens, but it should still pretty well describe my gut feeling about these classes.

Contracts: A (4 credits)
Civ Pro: B (4 credits)
Crim Law: A- (3 credits)
Crim Pro: B+ (3 credits)
Semester GPA if this scenario came true: 3.5

I would be entirely happy if that took place. It wouldn’t have me in the top 10% when combined with my summer class, but it would have me at least in the top 1/3.

I had a good time out with my friends that night, and two days later headed home to Washington for the holidays. Half of 1L is officially behind me. It was a good semester.

I had to put my disappointment in the civ pro exam behind me so that I could perform optimally on my last two exams, crim law and crim pro from Hoffmann.

As I put it in an e-mail later in the evening on the day that I took the exam,

“Hope the test went well for you Lauren. I’m putting mine behind me; I have to be like Peyton Manning and shrug an interception off like a man, not like Jay Cutler and go to the sideline to cry like a little baby about it. Okay, so I was whining through much of lunch with Justin and Ryan about it, but I’m done with that now. Until I see my grade, at least. Besides, I do think contracts went well.”

The sciatic nerve situation continued to take a toll on me. I couldn’t sit in my recliner at all anymore, I could really only find any reasonable comfort in sitting in a rigid (read: less comfortable) chair. I could set up on the right side of my couch to create a natural leaning, but even that wasn’t great. All of this made it much harder to study, I had to keep switching positions and periodically getting up to walk it off…just sort of miserable.

And when my study group came back over the next night, I discovered that they were once again ahead of me on their outlines. With them talking back and forth over the top of me while I was trying to get some individual work done (having recognized that they were talking about material that I wasn’t adequately prepared to discuss in-depth), and me again being really irritable due to my injury, I eventually just had to suggest that we break and reconvene as a group the next day when I would be better-prepared.

Ultimately, I ended up not meeting the next day either, and we just agreed to meet on Monday at the library, as on this topic I was mostly finding solo study to be more productive for me. We did finally get together  as planned on that Monday (the day before the exam), and did the one available practice exam that Hoffmann said would be relevant to this course. While I had worried in days leading up to this that I wasn’t very well-prepared to take this exam, both in my knowledge of the material and with Hoffmann’s style being so far from black letter law that I was unsure how he would test us, I felt really good about how well I knew the stuff when it came down to taking the practice exam and going over it with my friends. I continued to study throughout the day and late into the night, just discussing problems or questions as they came up with my friend over instant messages.

I went into the test feeling confident. My Facebook status update read, “After civ pro on Friday, I walked out, shook my head and said, “Good game, law school. You win.” Crim law final this morning will be my redemption.”

One note about these last two exams: unlike my contracts and civ pro exams, where outlines could be used, Hoffmann employed a closed book/closed note policy for his exams. The security blanket of an outline was going away, which I admit was a scary proposition. Of course, since everyone would be at the same disadvantage, it ultimately should not have mattered.

As I read through the exam question, I felt perfectly comfortable that I could write out a quality answer. I was also amused that in his hypothetical situations, Professor Hoffmann kept using a main character named Forest Panther, a professional golfer who had recently been found to be cheating on his wife. Clearly this was a reference to Tiger Woods, and I kept visualizing Tiger as I wrote my response; in fact, I had to stop myself several times from writing “Woods” instead of “Panther.”

This exam did have more than just essays to write. Hoffmann included a short answer section, with 10 questions that were worth a maximum of five points each. A concept or term would be written and you had to give a handwritten short answer response. He described the grading scale as follows…

You would get one point for writing anything, even just a check mark (he then proceeded to mention past students who would leave answers completely blank, which is obviously a silly mistake). You would get two points for getting close to the right definition of the term. You would get three points for getting the right definition. To get up into the four or five point range, you would then have to describe the applicability to the course and subject matter.

For the first nine questions, I knew the terms really well and thought I made a solid bid for five points in each of them. The tenth question, however, stumped me. I truly didn’t have any idea what the term meant. I pondered for 30 seconds on whether I could BS my way into more than one point, but decided that I couldn’t really see a way. I eventually just wrote, “You finally stumped me, Professor Hoffmann. Well played.” Sure, it’ll only get one point in the same way that a check mark would, but I can rarely resist an opportunity to try to be funny. I wasn’t that upset that one had stumped me, due to how well that I felt the first nine questions went.

In all honesty, this exam was my best performance of the finals period. I felt great about it, and felt afterward that I couldn’t really have performed much better than that; as to the short answer that stumped me, I never even found it in my notes when I looked later, and I never missed a session of crim law. There was obviously a failure in note-taking at some point, but not in my exam prep leading up to the test.

However, where my hope in civ pro lies with the fact that so many people seemed to be down about their own performance also, the opposite was taking place here. I wasn’t the only one who felt great about my exam; almost everyone seemed to. As such, this grade will be particularly difficult to predict. I wrote well enough that I could see myself getting an A, but it sounds like the competition for the few A’s in the course will be pretty fierce. I’m certainly hopeful that I’ll get at least an A-, but I’m prepared to find out that I got a B+ also. It would disappoint me a bit, but I just have to understand that with the brilliant minds I go to school with, if most seemed to feel good, I might be in the middle in this case. That, and we’re at the mercy of Hoffmann’s subjectivity on this one, even more than in other exams. The philosophical nature (as opposed to the concrete black letter stuff) lends itself to more professorial subjectivity, and Hoffmann did say himself that great weight would be given to the organization and thought process that was displayed in the answer. In other words, eloquence will win out in a big way in this exam. I like to believe myself to be eloquent, but reasonable minds may differ. In any case, I can’t possibly see myself being below a B+ on this exam.

I’ll get whatever I get on this exam, and will make peace with it. Like I said, I didn’t feel like I could have performed much better; as such, it would be irrational to be disappointed with myself if I didn’t get a mark that I liked. Obviously I could be disappointed with Hoffmann not liking my exam as much as I hope he will, but I’ve done what I can and it’s out of my control now.

I woke up the next day worse than expected. No, I wasn’t hung over…that would have been preferable, honestly. I woke up with a back injury, or more accurately a pinched sciatic nerve. I’ve had this before, it’s extremely painful and doesn’t go away for weeks. It makes it difficult to ever get in a comfortable position. This is not exactly what I wanted to run into as I knew immediately that I would have to sit for my last three finals with it. Ugh.

In any case, as we had begun to do every day in preparation for our finals, I had my study friends over and we got back to work. Honestly, I had gotten pretty irritable by this point. My friends did absolutely nothing wrong, but when you spend that many hours with someone doing an activity like studying that isn’t fun, you’re going to get edgy. When you do all of the above while dealing with sciatic nerve pain, you’re going to get really edgy. I bottled all of my frustrations with them since I knew very well that they were doing nothing wrong, but I was annoyed since I had begun hosting the study sessions instead of doing them at the library and that made it way harder to end the sessions without being rude. I couldn’t sit comfortably, I felt that my outline was behind theirs, I attempted to talk with them while laying on the floor of my living room…it just wasn’t ideal.

All of that griping aside, we were still productive and I still felt prepared for the civ pro final by the time we broke on Thursday evening. Another friend came by and we hung out and ignored the coming civ pro exam, and just chatted about anything else…like with shooting hoops with one of my friends a couple of days before, I totally stand by the need to take some time to just rest and unwind if possible before a final, provided that you’re ready…and I felt ready.

I did have a hard time getting to sleep that night and probably got no more than 4.5 hours of sleep, but I loaded up on Red Bull and honestly felt alert for the duration of the test. The format of this one was 90 minutes of multiple choice and 90 minutes of essay (this came with a word limit of 2000 words, so racing to type as many words as possible simply wasn’t going to happen in this case).

The multiple choice section went okay…I definitely got stumped a few times, but I didn’t feel that the section went badly. The exam instructions told us that if we got done with that section early (I got done with nearly a half hour to spare), we couldn’t start typing the essay but we could look ahead and start formulating an outline for our answer. As I turned the page and looked at the essay question…I was stumped. I mean, I spotted some things to write about, but in general my heart dropped; I really didn’t know what I was going to write. I got up and went to the bathroom since I couldn’t type yet anyway, and tried to gather my thoughts during this time. I didn’t come up with much, honestly.

I came back and made an effort at it, and we’ll see what happens when the grade comes back, but this exam did not feel good. Thankfully a ton of people seemed to gripe about how hard this test was and how badly they did also, so a soft curve might come to my rescue. My school grades to a B+ median, and looking at Professor Geyh’s past grade distributions, he rarely gives A’s out, which leaves lots of room in the curve for even more A-‘s and B+’s than other profs give out. I would call my chances at an A- to be almost non-existent, but I could get lucky and get a B+ here. Since his grade distributions don’t seem to ever go lower than B-, that’s my floor, but I do have a feeling that I did well enough to stay off of the very bottom. I’ll get a B or a B+ on this test, any other result is going to very much surprise me.

This was a morning final on a Friday, and once again I just couldn’t bring myself to crack back into the books for the rest of the day. These exams are a really draining experience. I should have battled through and at least gotten back into it at night, but I simply didn’t. I began hitting crim law hard on Saturday though, as the Tuesday final for that exam was next on the docket.

Two days before finals, I e-mail my friend Lauren looking for reassurance:

“Please reassure me that there’s a bunch of stupid people milling around silently under the radar who are going to pad the curve below me even though I don’t actually know anything about contracts, civ pro, criminal law or criminal procedure.”

Seriously, I figured that a lot of people that I haven’t met and don’t see around very much might be getting overwhelmed around this time. Not exactly the nicest thing for me to hope for, but I needed some kind of insurance against landing in the bottom half of the curve. In competition, part of succeeding is hoping that your opponent slips up.

To be honest though, after really productive group study sessions on Sunday and Monday night, by the time Tuesday came along my study partners and I all felt good about the coming test. In fact, despite the fact that my final on Tuesday wasn’t until 6 p.m., I didn’t study a lick during that day. I felt that I knew what I needed to know and that the best thing I could do was relax. One of said study partners went to the gym with me and we just shot the basketball around for a while until a couple of hours before the test. It was a nice little release.

I arrived in the testing room feeling pretty good…but the tension that others are obviously feeling is pretty infectious, and it’s hard not to get a little bit nervous. In the back of my mind, I knew I should be fine, but I equate the feeling to what I had when I did school and church dramas in high school; there were butterflies every time until I had spoken the first line, at which point I hit an immediate groove and nerves ceased to be an issue. I figured that the same would be the case here, that as soon as I wrote my first intelligent sentence on the test I’d settle down and feel pretty much fine for the duration.

As the test began, I was already a bit thrown by the fact that there was only one fact pattern to work through for the entire three hour test. To give you some idea, there are usually at least two questions, sometimes three, and they’ll each draw off of an extensive hypothetical that is spelled out over at least one full typed page. For this to have three or four pages of a really dense hypothetical (truly, it seems that every single word is on purpose in these), was a somewhat intimidating thing to start off against.

As I began to spot issues though, I calmed down a bit. It was a difficult test, more difficult than any of his past exams which I had worked through with my study group (they all agreed afterward), but I just worked through it piece by piece as calmly as I could, and by the end I was honestly pretty happy with the end result…and as time went on after the test, I only felt better and better about it. The only thing that really threw me for a loop was that restitution, probably among the five most talked-about concepts in the course, never presented itself at any point in the hypothetical. During the final moments of the exam, I was purely leafing through it just searching specifically for a way to work that concept into my test…it simply wasn’t there. I was relieved afterward when I mentioned this to several classmates and unanimously got a reaction of, “Yes, thank you!” We were all relieved that nobody could find it. It was amazing to me that he somehow didn’t put it on the test, but I’m confident that he truly didn’t. I’ll never know if he was trying to mess with us or if it was just a strange oversight…

The other thing that disturbed me as I finished my test was my word count. I had only typed about 3800 words. My perception on the word count concept had been skewed during the summer because I had typed about 8200 words on my torts exam; I was fully aware that I wouldn’t type nearly as many on this one, both because that was a four hour exam and this was a three hour exam, and also because Professor Bethel made a point of telling us that he wouldn’t be impressed by or reward high word counts. Still, coming in with less than half the amount of words spooked me…until I started broaching the subject with classmates and found that they had typed less than I had, or an equal amount. I henceforth found that torts exam to be a huge aberration from what I would usually type on the test, and if my memory serves me correctly this 3800 word count from my contracts exam turned out to be the highest of the four in this finals period.

Since my mind had been put at ease on both the restitution and word count issues, I calmed down and became really happy with how the exam had gone. This was bolstered to an extent by an unsure feeling I sensed among my classmates…this hadn’t been an easy test, and I got the sense that I felt better about it than a lot of others did. I think I put myself in position to contend for an A here, but time will tell; I’ll say that I feel good enough about this exam that I’ll be disappointed with anything less than an A-.

By the time my exam was uploaded into the system, it was 9:30 p.m. In theory, I should have gone home and studied civil procedure…but give me a break. A three hour exam is really mentally tiring, and I doubt any studying I could have done that night would be productive. I joined some classmates who went and grabbed a beer at Kilroy’s, enjoyed my evening, and went to bed knowing that my next two days had to be really productive in preparation for Friday’s civ pro final.

This was the last week of actual classes. I hesitate to let you in on the ridiculously dorky humor that we law students share, but when I missed civ pro this week and my friend Heather sent me notes, I responded:

“Much appreciated.

I’m sure these notes were meant as a gift, but my decision not to come to class could also constitute consideration since I woke up 10 minutes before class and still in need of a shower.

P.S. I hate contracts.”

(Consideration is a legal term that would help distinguish a gift from a legally enforceable bargain.) Oh the humanity. Not only was law school sucking my energy by this point, but my humor standards were falling through the floor. How embarrassing.

This week, all of my profs held exam review sessions either inside or outside of class. I won’t bore you with most of the details, but I did enjoy one anecdote from Professor Hoffmann’s criminal procedure review session. Montejo v. Louisiana is a decision that came down in 2009 that overruled the previous standing law, Michigan v. Jackson. The cases had to do with the conditions under which a detainee could waive their Miranda rights. I knew that Hoffmann had clerked for Justice Rehnquist at the U.S. Supreme Court, but he put it in perspective here by mentioning that he had written the dissenting opinion in Michigan v. Jackson and his language was actually quoted in the new controlling law as established in Montejo. “After 23 years, I’ve been vindicated!” Hoffmann is such a rock star.

Group study continued as the week drew to a close. I was regaining some confidence in my ability to do well on the contracts exam, but it was still stressful; I wasn’t really sure how I was going to measure up to my classmates on test day. All of my classmates kept talking about how they couldn’t wait to be done with finals. Personally, I would’ve been on board with another week to prepare…the fact that this coming Tuesday was my first final was a scary thought.

It was Thanksgiving week. For the first time in my life, I wouldn’t be spending the holiday with my family. Granted, it’s not a holiday I actually care much about, but it was just going to be weird spending it alone. Happily, my network of friends came to the rescue as they always do.

After crim pro on Monday, I’m walking back toward my apartment when my friend Lauren strikes up this conversation:

Her: So, heading back to Washington for the holiday?
Me: Nah, too expensive and too close to Christmas. I’ll just be here in town.
Her: So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?
Me: I don’t know…Arby’s? (I was kidding about that much, haven’t had Arby’s in years.)

She invited me to join her and her boyfriend at her family’s place in Indianapolis. That made my whole week better, both being able to look forward to the holiday and also the holiday itself.

On Tuesday of this week, our LRW final memo was due; upon turning this in, we would finally be done with this class until next semester. I got it done late on Monday, then was stupid enough to go out and grab a celebratory beer with a few friends. As was put so aptly in No Country for Old Men, “Beer leads to more beer.” I ended up being up later than I wanted to. I had already skipped civ pro class on Monday morning to work on my paper, and after just a handful of hours of sleep on Tuesday morning, my alarm was blaring at me. I thought about skipping again. I hadn’t done anything more than skim the readings, so I wasn’t ready to get called on. And I wanted badly to keep sleeping. With that said, missing consecutive classes is something I really didn’t want to do, so I forced myself out of bed and in a zombie-like state spent the half hour before I had to leave by looking over the cases a bit more in case today was finally the day I’d get called on. Still feeling utterly worthless, and not ready to speak intelligently about football, let alone civ pro…I trudged off to class.

With the memo due at noon and this class starting at 9 a.m., it was unsurprisingly only half full. Some had procrastinated harder than I had. My e-mail:

“Barely awake or alive. Mostly just skimmed the readings. If I get called on, it’ll be a greasefire. Hopefully showing up on LRW Memo Day will get me some grace if needed.”

You guessed it. 15-20 minutes after I sent that e-mail, Professor Geyh brings up the newest case, and then looks at me and says, “Leaf, can you get us started?” His pronunciation of my name amused others; I’m quite used to nobody getting it right on their first try. In any case, my heart sunk that today was finally the day to get called on, since I was far less prepared on this day than I ever let myself be before attending this class. In any case, I soldiered up and confidently said yes as I reached for my casebook to put in front of me to prepare to answer questions…as I glanced at my computer screen I saw an IM from a classmate who knew I was long awaiting this moment, saying “Wow, go Leif go!” My inner reaction was, “Oh shut up, I don’t need additional pressure to not look stupid here.”

“Can you get us started?” is Geyh-speak for “please give us the facts of the case.” That much I could do, it was a case about a traffic accident where both sides had sued each other in separate actions, and inconsistently both courts found in favor of their respective plaintiff. The argument revolved around whether the first decision had to be binding since it should have been a settled matter by that point. I described these basic facts and concepts, but all that really proves is that I read the first few paragraphs and comprehended them.

When you get cold-called though, you’re prone to have to answer any number of successive questions. Geyh asked, “What cause of action did <one of the parties> put forward here?” I said, “Negligence.” He didn’t seem to hear me, and continued to just look at me. My confidence shaken, I said, “Umm…this is a tort claim for negligence, right?” I couldn’t possibly see how it could be anything else. He confirmed that I was right. Whew.

He then follows with, “Okay, now drawing on what I was saying yesterday…” I immediately thought, “And…we have just lost cabin pressure.” As previously mentioned, I had skipped the session the day before in favor of working on LRW…I wasn’t going to have a clue on this next one. He asked me how the concept from yesterday’s class applied to this case. Rather than just tell him I wasn’t sure, I go ahead and attempt a filibuster: I deliberately answer some other question that he hadn’t actually asked, in order to buy myself some time and see if he would reword the question in a way that I might be able to give some kind of reasonable answer.

Sure enough, he stops me in mid-filibuster and says, “Okay, you’re wanting to talk about res judicata, and I can understand that, but what I’m asking is…” He restates his question more completely. He says, “Couldn’t the defendant have filed a rule 13a counterclaim during the initial trial?” I sure think the answer is yes, but we covered this concept a few weeks ago, how did it get altered by what he said yesterday? The “yesterday” concept made me tentative, so I just slowly said, “Umm…I’m not seeing why not. I’m going to say yes?” He laughed and said, “Thought I was trying to trip you up? The answer is yes, you’re right. And would this be a permissive or compulsory counterclaim?” Back to feeling like I knew what was up, I said, “Compulsory. It all arose from the same sequence of events.” He confirmed my answer, then followed, “And if he passes on the chance to file that counterclaim at the time of the trial, can he file it later?” I correctly say no. He moves on and starts questioning the next person. I was off the hot seat, and breathed a sigh of relief. Somehow, under the worst circumstances that I could have been called on, I came away unscathed and may have even managed to sound intelligent. To some extent, I felt a bit lucky…but I was happy to take it. Friends gave me kudos after class.

Most students were cold-called earlier and more often in their classes during this semester, it’s one of those rites of passage of being a law student that nobody really likes…but since Geyh was the only professor I drew who did any cold-calling, and since he didn’t get around to me in this huge class until there were only a handful of class meetings left, it took me this long. I was just relieved that it went well. I could officially just go into full-on exam prep mode for civ pro, since there was no way he was going to call on me again in the last few regular sessions.

I went and handed my LRW memo in, skated through my remaining classes, and was on Thanksgiving break for the next five days. Some parting words that I liked from Professor Bethel at the end of the last class before break began: “The finals period is nothing that this school should be proud of. There’s a lot of tension and stress and people who go off the deep end. I hope that you’ll take a day during this break to truly take a break. Watch some football and drink some beer…or hell, just drink some beer…but give yourself some time off.” Bethel loved playing the role of curmudgeon…he once asserted, “I try not to waste a lot of time smiling” (a quote I’m absolutely in love with; true to form, we saw him smile one time all semester)…but there just wasn’t any doubt in the world that he was a softy if you got underneath the surface.

Turkey Day in Indianapolis was a lot of fun; Lauren’s family took me in and made me feel right at home, and thankfully seemed to enjoy having me there as well. It was good to have an enjoyable holiday. I spent the rest of the weekend trying to get work done, but unfortunately a splitting headache overcame me for much of it.

I did have a study session with a small group of friends for contracts, our first final. You know how I’ve always mentioned that I was comfortable that contracts would work out well when all was said and done? That feeling kind of dipped a bit after this session. My friends Ryan and Justin were further along in their outlines than I was and seemed more knowledgeable to some extent as well. We agreed to reconvene in a week to begin doing practice tests, and I vowed to them that I would have my outline completely and fully done by then so that I could adequately keep up with them. That was my #1 priority for the next week.

The Seahawks still technically had a shot at doing something this season as they headed into Arizona. And if you’re a fan and tuned into the game, you’ll know that they actually played great early on. That’s when I unleash this e-mail:

“The Seahawks are playing a great half, they’re underdogs today and they went up by two touchdowns a bit before halftime.

While part of me is happy about this, a whole bunch of me truly has an inner reaction of, “Oh crap…this is just going to hurt worse now when things go south.”

Sadly enough, this is just how I roll.”

Sure enough, the game fell apart from there. At some point, it stops being paranoia if you’re right often enough. My emotional attachment to the Seahawks season officially died this day.

And naturally, on Monday, the civ pro drama continued.

“This freaking civ pro cold-call better happen tomorrow. I’m sick of the amount of detail I’m consuming in reading these cases just waiting for Geyh to call on me. I want it out of the way so I can start merely skimming the cases and concentrating on studying for the final. AAAAAHHHH!”

You guessed it…it didn’t happen this day. Or for the rest of this week. Somehow out of a class of 110 people I had managed to draw somewhere around number 105 on the cold-calling list.

Funny anecdote from the middle of the week:

If you play racquetball, you know you get pelted by the ball somewhat frequently…usually in the back, sometimes in the head. Since your back is turned most of the time when this happens, it does sting a little, but isn’t a huge deal. It usually isn’t anyway. On an evening when I went and played this week though, my friend John uncorked a hit straight into the small of my back that I was feeling a week later. My usual tough reaction where I hardly acknowledge that it hurts, and just shake my head and cue my opponent to go ahead so we can start the next point, was much less tough this time. Think lots of cuss words and me circling around in dire pain. The fabric of my t-shirt touching my back was too much to take. I lifted the back of my shirt so that my opponent could see the welt, and he confirmed that he practically branded me with the logo of the ball. It was awful.

As we were leaving the gym, I griped to his girlfriend Heather (same one I keep e-mailing in civ pro) that he had beaten me up pretty badly. He had beaten on our friend Ryan as well…unintentionally of course, but we were both welted up pretty badly. She assured us that she would make it up to us. Fast forward to the next day. Before civ pro, Heather arrives with cookies that she baked last night…gives three to me, three to Ryan. That was nice. Ryan said, “These look great.” I said, “Yes. Yes they do.” He said, “I should bring these home to my wife…” I thought, “Wow, that’s nice of him to share,” then he completed his sentence, “…and tell her that this is what chocolate chip cookies should look like.” I couldn’t stop laughing, especially since he’s one of the nicer guys you’d want to meet.

Something happened this week that was a bigger deal than I’ll really go into here. Our career services department is fantastic, absolutely fantastic. I have good relationships with the Dean and one of the Directors, and they both go above and beyond to be as helpful as possible. In scheduling an appointment to get myself started toward my 1L summer job search, I was randomly assigned to a new guy who was working with the department in his very first week, and was treated as badly as I’ve ever been treated by anyone. He apparently treated many others badly as well. I’ll forgo details here because I have no desire to besmirch the name of our career services department, who is indeed first-class; I’m confident I ran into an aberration here. When I filed my little and large complaints to them, they were professional and understanding. They quickly restored my faith in their department. While it was a very upsetting experience, I feel fine about it now and relations between the career services department and myself are better than ever. (Sorry for the purposely vague version of this story; again, lack of anonymity sort of handcuffs me.)

Schoolwork and follow-ups on that particular situation closed out my week.

The semester was continuing to grind away at me. From the beginning of the first class of the week, as a case where an oil refinery was being sued came up:

“ Here’s hoping that Professor Geyh doesn’t remember me talking to him about working in an oil refinery, and consequently call on me today because I’m his legal oil refinery correspondent.

Monday mornings become harder and harder to wake up for.”

The funny thing is that, in spite of this type of correspondence, and in spite of the fact that I tend toward being a curmudgeon a lot of the time, I honestly maintained a more positive attitude toward law school than most did. It was, as expected, a lot of work wearing away at me…but I never became unhappy with being there, even on days that I wasn’t enjoying myself.

In any case, Professor Geyh did not call on me this day, or for the rest of the week. My frustration with not being able to just get that out of the way mounted further.

The rest of the week was something of a blur academically…there was significant work to be done on an LRW assignment, and that ended up being a huge time suck. My hate for LRW knows  no bounds.

I did have my friends John and Heather over for a Saturday night viewing of The Remains of the Day. Mostly I was just happy to see them outside of class, since I was rarely getting that opportunity as school ramped up, but that movie is always a pleasure to watch as well. Don’t take my compliment about it being Anthony Hopkins’s finest acting lightly…I’m a huge Hopkins fan, and he’s obviously been fantastic in any number of films.

Oh, and a plug for a hilarious quote from a great episode of Parks & Recreation this week. Ron Swanson, who I truly love: “If I could have one dying wish on my deathbed, it would be for both of my ex-wives to rush to my side so I could tell them both to go to hell one last time. Would I ever get married again? Oh, absolutely. If you don’t believe in true love, what’s the point of living this life?” That show has truly become great this season.

Week Twelve (November 8^th-14^th, 2009)

November 8^th marked one month before the first final of the semester. That thought was a daunting one. While I wasn’t falling way behind, I sure didn’t feel like I was on pace to do a great job on finals by then. Since the paltry attempts I made at outlining over fall break, I had basically not touched my outlines again. I had a civ pro outline to work with from a successful 2L from last year, and I brought that out to use on our in-class practice exams (which largely had gone really badly, officially making me more scared than ever about the class), but my own outlining was hardly happening. The approaching finals began to stress me out.

After the practice exam we took this week, my thoughts:

“I know so very little about civil procedure. What a greasefire this practice exam was.

I need to withdraw from society and just spend all of my time studying this crap for the next month.”

I do tend toward being a bit hard on myself, but I really didn’t feel good after this one. It felt like I had actually taken steps backward since the previous practice exam. Professor Geyh’s assurance that this was a harder-than-usual practice exam didn’t really quell my fears.

I haven’t mentioned much about my other classes because not much in them had changed. I still had no idea where Hoffmann was taking us with crim law (though I continued to find the lectures enjoyable for the most part), I still felt slightly confused but mostly comfortable with contracts, and I still felt like I was a sinking ship in crim pro with no hope of ever catching up on the reading. I had given that up long ago. I didn’t know how I would possibly pull a good grade out of that class.

This week, the career services department hosted a resume round table function where area lawyers and judges came in to honestly critique our resumes. It was set up kind of like speed dating, where you just get five minutes with each person then move on. I found it to be a useful function, my resume got positive comments and each reviewer gave the exact same criticism of it; the consistency told me that I was getting good advice, and I followed it. I admittedly felt weird going into it, because I had been previously told that a shirt and tie would be fine, then career services told us, “wear a suit,” about three days before the function. I had been dragging my feet and hadn’t bothered purchasing one yet. Sure enough, I was the only guy to show up just wearing a tie. Slightly embarrassing, but I got over it quickly, once I got into the function it didn’t seem that noticeable.

I pretty much kept to studying this week and weekend, though I did take the time to watch the CMA Awards this week. I love me some CMA Awards. It wasn’t the greatest edition of the awards, and I was disappointed that Brad Paisley didn’t break through and finally win Entertainer of the Year, but I still enjoyed kicking back and watching some TV. My TV often doesn’t come on for days at a time while the semester is in progress, and when it does I almost never watch something three hours long (unless a classmate wants to come watch The Godfather of course…believe me, I’ll always make time for that), so this was nice. By the way, disappointingly enough, it’s harder to find fellow country music fans in Bloomington than it is in Washington. Go figure.

Upon return from break, I bumped into my friends Heather and John, and they mentioned that they figured I’d be getting cold-called in civ pro this week. They were confident that basically everyone but me had been called on (they already had), and since Professor Geyh was working his way through the class seating chart, my number was bound to be up soon. This naturally put me even more on edge in each ensuing civ pro session, but honestly I just wanted to get it out of the way at this point. As it turned out, they put me on edge more than a bit prematurely, and I didn’t get called on in any of the three sessions this week. Or the next week. Apparently there were plenty of people left who hadn’t been called on. It was sort of tough to keep track of this, since our civ pro class had more than 100 people in it.

Anyway, you’ll remember in my previous post that I asserted the fall break to have recharged my batteries as needed. That was my feeling at the time at least. Fast forward to my very first class session after the break, and this would be the first e-mail I sent.

“When I got back from break, I thought I had been rejuvenated and gained a decent chunk of energy to tackle the rest of the semester with.

Sometimes I have silly thoughts.

WTF, we’ve only been here for 40 minutes…”

A semester just piles up on you. And by the way, “Sometimes I have silly thoughts” was definitely inspired by Stanley Hudson suggesting that Michael might be a genius, then quickly laughing and following with, “Sometimes I say crazy things.”

Here was an unrelated observation I made in an e-mail a couple of days later:

“A professor cussing in a joke will always get a laugh, even if the joke isn’t actually funny. It’s as certain as a pastor telling a stupid joke from the pulpit getting a laugh.”

Seriously, people. We owe it to each other as a society to only laugh if a joke is actually funny. When quality humor gets devalued, we all lose.

Anyway, the end of this week marked Halloween, and while I’ve been a longtime Grinch about celebrating that holiday, the peer pressure mounted up and I eventually gave way to popular demand and ordered a Viking costume. It turned out to be a pretty big hit, and both the law school party at Jake’s (a downtown bar) and a party the following night at my classmate Laura’s place were both quite a bit of fun. I suppose I’ll officially drop the boycott and do the Halloween thing again in the future.

It was the week before fall break. I was becoming hugely burnt out. I previously mentioned the frequent short e-mails that I would send and receive in civ pro. This one pretty much summed up my feelings.

“It’s still only frigging Tuesday?? <expletive>.

I need fall break…”

My drive to work hard was becoming non-existent. I just wanted to do whatever the bare minimum was to get through my week. My plane tickets were purchased and I was heading home to Washington. As such, my recollections of the week are pretty minimal.

I did have this tidbit come up, which was both awkward and amusing. As a bit of back story, someone who I was good friends with this semester is my married female neighbor Erin. Her husband lives in Chicago. I hang out with her frequently enough that her husband has teased her about me being “her Bloomington husband.” I hang out with him too when he comes and visits her on weekends, and he actually told me that he’s glad to have someone like me around her who he can trust, so he’s purely teasing when he makes comments like that. It became a running joke among the three of us in any case.

In any case, I dropped in at the nearby bar during this week when she texted me and told me that some people were out. I was talking with her and another female classmate when the following exchange came up:

Erin: “Leif is sort of my Bloomington husband.”
Leif: “Yep, yep. That’s what I’m told.”
Female classmate: “That’s cool. All I need is someone to cuddle with too.”

Erin and I look at each other in horror, and then I look back at this girl and really strongly say, “We do NOT do THAT.” Sheesh. I always try to avoid the appearance of impropriety (as well as avoiding actual impropriety, of course), but you can’t really successfully manage everyone else’s perceptions of you all the time. No, really, you can’t. Believe me, I try.

Anyway, nothing significant really happened this week. Just trudging along to fall break. On Friday I boarded a plane home to Washington for a much-needed vacation.

Week Nine (October 18^th-24^th, 2009)

Break was uneventful. I meant to work heavily on my outlines to begin my final exam prep, but essentially all I really did was succeed in beginning to outline contracts…and even then I didn’t get far on it. I basically didn’t touch on any other class. My goals of being productive went largely unmet.

It was of course good to see family and friends again, and always will be, but there was still something slightly strange about being home. It quickly reminded me of a quote from David Fincher’s underrated film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: “It’s a funny thing about coming home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You’ll realize that what’s changed is you.” I don’t think I had really changed that drastically in only the four months I had been gone, but I did feel a bit different. And home felt different. When I get asked periodically by people in Indiana whether or not I miss Washington, my reaction is generally that I do miss people in Washington, but I don’t know if I really miss the state itself. I mean, I do love it and it will always be my home state, but in all honesty I really like where I’m currently set up and am in no rush to leave my new region. Obviously I’ll still want to visit whenever I can because, again, plenty of people in Washington are still important to me.

Anyway, this break was definitely helpful as far as recharging my batteries goes. I saw the people I wanted to see, I actually got to return to my old post as the Blaine High School stadium announcer for part of one of the football games, I got plenty of time to just rest up…it was a good trip.