I wish I could blame my bad eyes on Law School

So I've always been as blind as a bat. And I mean I couldn't tell the difference between a lawn mower and Santa Claus blind as a bat. My whole family is. My grandma was told to put my dad in a home because "he would never be able to have a normal life." My nephew's pediatrician told my sister that he was the  blindest baby she'd seen in a decade without being completely blind. One of my cousin's had a seeing eye dog. 

We just have crappy eyes. But when i was in my teens, my dad's insurance finally agreed to pay for me to have LASIK eye surgery. I was told that it probably wouldn't get me to 20/20 and it definitely wouldn't last but it would help. They were wrong on the first one. Three days later, I could see perfectly and I've been without glasses for almost 11 years. That all ended today. 

I am back in the world of glasses and I'm not sure how I feel about it. One problem is that I switched to contacts long before I got lasik and threw my glasses away. Right now, I can't afford contacts or the fitting exam so my only choice was to buy glasses. So I have these weird lines where the frames are and my glasses are making me dizzy and nauseous. They are also making my head hurt. I'm just not used to glasses anymore. More than that, I look so different in them. Not bad (glasses are much cuter now) but different. Every time I look in the mirror it takes me a second to recognize myself. Do you know how weird it is to not recognize yourself in the mirror? 

Freedom!!

Finals are done!! Finals are done!!

Yayayayayayayay!!

I'm going to go take a nap. And by nap, I mean sleep for a week. 

1L Exams

Somehow our section ended up with the most abnormal law school professors ever. We have no traditional issue spotting essay exams! All the other sections do but we happened to get the three unconventional professors. The class that came the closest by having essay questions is the most abnormal of them all by allowing us to have three exams throughout the semester. And for the final, he tries to make it easier on us by switching to only multiple choice. Wow!

My first exam is Criminal Law on Tuesday and it will consist of 90 multiple choice questions and 13 short answer. 

My second exam is Civil Procedure on Thursday and unlike the first two exams in this class, it will consist of 16 multiple choice questions with an area to write in why we chose that answer. 

My contracts exam is next week and we don't know the number of questions but it's all multiple choice. 

I've always done well on multiple choice questions (hence why I took the LSAT) but law school multiple choice questions are a different beast. Some of the questions are over a page long for just that one question. The answers are usually all true (or false) and we have to pick the one that is the most true or the most false. Tricky little things. 

Well, this was a lovely break but I should get back to studying. 

Wish me luck and I'll see you on the other side. 

Happy Thanksgiving!!

What does a law student do on Thanksgiving? Well this one studies Criminal Law! In part because finals start in just a few days. The other part is that my family is 3,500 miles away and although a few friends invited me to their families dinner, it just didn't seem worth the loss of studying hours.

I'm not alone though, quite a few of my classmates decided not to go home for Thanksgiving, even if they are by comparison, close by. Sadly, their families don't understand and are irked. Leaving the student even more stressed. Come on guys, finals start four days after Thanksgiving. No, I do not think it is fair either but it is just the way it is.

I made the best of it though. I wasn't about to cook a turkey just for me so I grabbed my books and I went to Denny's. I ate my turkey and pie while making Crim Law flashcards! Win/Win in my book.

Time for Finals

So I just finished my last class of my first semester of law school! Man, time flew. In exactly two weeks from today, I will be done with finals and I will finally get a break. Sort of. Apparently during Christmas break, I am expected to apply to the bar, apply for summer internships, and join bar memberships. Not to mention, go to the eye doctor, get my drivers license changed over, clean my house (Oh does my house need it) and do all the other little things I haven't had time for. But hey, this is law school. I don't really get Thanksgiving off so why would Christmas be any different?

But that's all stuff I can worry about later. As of right now, I'm in FINALS MODE. All finals all the time. I'm about to head to Denny's to catch up on my civ pro reading and hopefully go through my Crim Law supplement and chart the differences between the MPC and Common Law. If a potential law student ever reads this, Pay attention to the difference in class! Make flashcards throughout the semester at the end of every chapter so you're not at the end going, hmmm, I kinda remember this but I don't remember which is which.

As a side note, my professors were nice enough to give us all an outline today. Of course they did, I finished my outlines last night! No, but it's actually really helpful because I can compare mine against theirs and find out what I missed. I'm sure I missed something! Or lots of somethings. So Whooo Hoo for nice professors. Apparently, this is a rare thing. My civ pro professor told me that when he first started giving handouts/notes he got a lot of crap for it and other professors accused him of spoon feeding the students. I'm all for spoon feeding! My goodness professor, you look so nice and pretty today. And you're obviously the smartest person in the world. Now about the final . . . 

I feel that writing my own outline helped me understand the material in my head and getting theirs helps me find what I missed. Plus, I have a feeling that at least some of the students won't bother making their own even though our professor's version is incredibly short and brief. Mine are not the monster outlines that people warn you against but it's not five pages either. So we'll see.

Back Up Your Back Up!

Way back when, before I was a law student, my best friend was a 1L at the law school closest to us. And one day someone stole all of her notes. Just bam. Everything gone. And I remember her sobbing on my couch at three o'clock in the morning telling me she was going to drop out of law school to become a hobo.

So when it came time for me to start, I bought a ton of thumb drives and I backed up everything. Every day of class notes, every bit of research, everything. However, somewhere after the first month of school, my thumb drive became corrupted/damaged and it screwed up the files on my computer. I freaked. Straight up FREAKED. All those hours of notes just poofed. Now it eventually turned out okay and I managed to only lose a few days of notes and everything was fine. But it has made me paranoid. I have my computer pass coded and I back up my back ups. Oh, and I send myself an email with all of my class notes at the end of each week. Is it overkill? Absolutely. Does it help keep my stress level down? Oh yes. 

Today I was proofreading my memo and my computer crashed. I couldn't remember the last time I had saved the current draft but I knew that I had sent myself an email with it only a few hours before. So while my computer was rebooting, I went outside and played with my dog instead of having a nervous breakdown and forgetting how to breathe. 

Being paranoid isn't always a bad thing. 

Classroom Shenanigans

So yes, we use the socratic method. Yes, we go through eight times as much material as we would in undergrad. But if someone tells you class in law school is never fun, they lie.

The other day in Contracts, I walk in and see that Chapter 17 is pulled up on the powerpoint. Wait? What? We weren't assigned Chapter 17. I look over at the guy next to me and he's frantically flipping through the book apparently hoping he can read it in the 3 minutes before class starts. Whispers are flying around the room. What is going on here?

Eventually, a guy walks in with a guitar and my professor pulls out a ukulele.

"I can teach you everything you need to know about Chapter 17 in under five minutes."

And then they sang a song about men in prison, frigid women and who know's what else. And they made us sing along with the chorus. Guys, we had a sing-a-long in contracts.

It was genius. And I truly understood mistake, impracticability, and impossibility in under five minutes.

I think law school should be a musical.