Wake up in the Morning, Feeling Like...

Boyfriend and I made a promise last night.  We promised each other that we would get home at a reasonable hour because I had class at 9 am this morning.  But then we had too much fun and closed down the bar instead.  Oops.  At least I made new friends.  (Hi new friends!)  So since I didn't get home until three and didn't get to sleep until 3:30 and was awake at 7:30 this morning, I have nothing prepared for you.  So while I think about my priorities and how I clearly need to rearrange them, I'm going to send you over to the brand new blog of my friend Michonne.

She actually writes two.  One is about food, but the other one is about law school.  Michonne is what we call a "non-traditional" student.  That means that instead of getting a useless undergraduate degree and coming straight to law school, Michonne got a useful degree (in journalism) and worked for a newspaper for a little while first.  She also appreciates sleep as much as I do.

So, while I sit here in utter misery because my attendance is required, I'm going to go ahead and send you over there to read something interesting, ok?  Ok.  Sorry.

http://yellowbrickrodeo.wordpress.com/

It's that Catholic Guilt

My morning class was cancelled today, so I decided to sleep in as late as I wanted.  I apparently only "wanted" to sleep in an extra 45 minutes.  Or at least part of me did.  My body is saying, "Go back to sleep.  The last two days were awful.  You deserve it."  Meanwhile, my brain is behaving like it's an ADD squirrel on drugs.  "GET UP!  IT'S MOOOOOOORNING!!!!!"  Because my brain wouldn't leave my body alone.  Here I am at 8 am with nothing* to do in the morning for the first time in two weeks, and I'm awake.

I have become completely incapable of sleeping in in the morning, no matter what day of the week it is.  I expect many of you have this problem too, whether you are legal-tastic or not.  Unfortunately, I've gotten my body set to a 7 am to 11 pm schedule, so even though I stayed up until 2 am last night, my brain clicked on at 6:45, and I only managed to put it into sleep mode for another hour.

I read a study a few years ago^ that said turning off the alarm isn't a good thing to do for your health.  Sleeping in on the weekend is apparently bad for your brain, as it confuses your internal clock and makes you more tired.  Back then, this made me feel superior, as I've always been bad at sleeping late.  Now it just frustrates me more because when I'm trying to get much-needed rest, the little voice in the back of my mind is going "It's not good for you anyway."

I would like to smash that little voice with a sledgehammer.

However, I have learned a very neat trick when it comes to turning off that voice in your brain, which I would like to share with you:  Do something.  Doesn't matter what it is.  Whatever tasks your brain is telling you must be accomplished, pick one or two that you can do from bed.  I, for instance, am writing this, and then I am going to make a quick phone call.  All from my bed.  And then my brain can't tell me, "What are you doing?  It's morning!  You need to get busy!"  I got busy.  And now I'm going to take a nap.

Now where is my sledgehammer?

Or I can make do with a giant knife.  Whatever's handy.

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*I mean, it's law school, there's always something to do, not just something incredibly PRESSING.
^Which I of course can't find now.

Monday, Monday. Can't trust that day.

Today I have seen more posts on facebook about how unhappy people are that it's Monday than I usually see in a whole month.  I have to agree.  This weekend, for all I didn't have classes for nearly four days, seemed ridiculously short.

Of course, it doesn't help that Monday has been screwing me over in numerous ways already.

1.  I did not get to drink my morning coffee because when I poured the creamer in, a gluey ball of creamer went in and when stirred, did not separate.  It was a cup of hot, steaming French Roast with a creamy center.  Gross.  I dumped it out.
2.  Lettuce froze in the fridge.  Sandwich now looks super gross and rotten.
3.  In Secured Transactions, the professor announced that his lectures for the rest of the semester would not be related to any exam material.  Of course, attendance is still required.  Even thought it's my least favorite class, I will be stuck listening to irrelevant lectures for the next two weeks without reprieve.

So yes.  It's only been 60 hours since Friday and I am ready to quit until Friday shows its face again.  Whoops.  Not possible.  I apparently have to attend classes that are irrelevant.

How is your Monday going?  Is it making you miserable as well?

Legal Television Tropes, Part the Second

I really hate television shows about the practice of law.  I may be the only law student who can truthfully say I have never seen a full episode of Law & Order.  Not a single one.  In any of its incarnations.  I think I watched half of an episode once, but two things stuck out to me immediately:

1.  The whole thing was so unrealistic that it was a major turn-off.  The timeline, the political pressures, the investigation, it was all ridiculous.
2. It’s shows like Law & Order that helped make my mother completely overprotective.  Everybody is always getting raped and murdered.  It’s no wonder I had to be home by 10 pm even though I was 20 years old and lived in the world’s tiniest town-without-crime.

So it’s really no wonder that I made it a crusade to avoid legal shows.*  However, I must confess: I have become addicted to NBC’s Harry’s Law.  And I’m sure half of you out there are going, “WHY?”

Okay.  I know the premise is crazy.  Brilliant patent lawyer (Kathy Bates/the titular “Harry”) gets bored with her life and starts smoking pot in her office while watching Looney Tunes.  She then gets fired and has two near death experiences which convince her that she should open up a law office in an abandoned shoe store in the worst part of Cincinnati.  I told you it was far-fetched.

Like most legal shows, it follows a relatively small cast of characters in a “case-of-the-week” context.  There is some bad dialogue.  I think it comes from the usual problem of non-lawyers trying to write witty things about the law and not  quite making it.  Also, I wish Brittany Snow would disappear from the show.  It is set in the Cleveland ghetto.  I wish someone would shoot her.  But that’s not important, because that’s not where the glory of Harry’s Law lies. 

No, the glory of Harry’s Law lies in two things:

1. Kathy Bates delivering dry, sarcastic lines because while she cares deeply about the people around her, she really doesn’t give a damn about their personal problems and has no issues with telling them so.
2.  The presentation of the law itself, from making appropriate objections (which NEVER HAPPENS IN LEGAL SHOWS AND MOVIES AND IT MAKES MY STOMACH TURN), to ethical concerns that most people don’t realize lawyers face every day, to trying to find justice for everybody, not just the white and wealthy.

In a recent episode, “Send in the Clowns,” the show dealt with the idea of public defenders, and how they’re seen as law trash, scum who trick juries into putting criminals back on the street.  But as the “law trash” defense lawyer points out in a great scene, “He could be innocent.  Which is a jury question.  Our job is to fight for the guy.  And if you’re sitting there, suggesting that we fight a little less hard for the ones we think did it, maybe you should save a little of that disgust for yourself.  Ronald Perry deserves best efforts.  They all do.”

And isn’t that the essence of the law?  Everyone deserves due process?  Everyone gets to be innocent until they’re proven guilty?  And then, my favorite part of the show is always Harry’s closing argument that encapsulates the point the episode is trying to make about the law.  It’s always brilliant and heartfelt without being overly preachy.  To make my point: 

“To be honest, when I first got this case, I thought, ‘ick.’  Who wants these kinds of cases anyway?  The facts are ugly, they don’t pay, and when I first saw the defendant, I thought ‘He probably did it.’  I’m sure a few of you think the same.  And the victim, he’s intelligent, clean-cut, upper middle class, certainly no motive to lie, why wouldn’t we believe him?  I mean, he was there, for God’s sake.  If he says it was Ronald Perry, then who the hell are we to doubt him? 

“Well, you have a duty to doubt him.  You took an oath to demand that the prosecution satisfy its burden of proving guilt beyond all reasonable doubt.  And they haven’t done that.  They never found the watch or wallet in my client’s possession, never located a gun, they introduced no physical evidence, no circumstantial evidence, no forensics of any kind.  Just the eyewitness account from a man who clearly had to be in shock.  A man who was able to describe almost nothing about his assailant.  For the gun, you heard the meticulous details; for the suspect, “fat latino.”   That’s it.  Maybe Mr. Layton got it right.  Perhaps it was Ronald Perry...

“What’s the point?  Well, the point is, once you relax those standards, once you say, ‘close enough is good enough,’ seems guilty, lock him up,’ it’s not just the guilty who are at risk, but the innocent.  You.  Me...The State has not satisfied its burden.  It hasn’t even come close.  He has not been proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.  You can’t charge a man, take away his freedom with no physical evidence but one shocky I.D. and call that justice.  You can’t be satisfied with that.  Assuming of course, you care.  Do you?”**

This was a ridiculously long post, thanks to all of the transcription.  But seriously, Harry’s Law is a winner.  And though the season finale premiered Monday, it’s worth catching on summer repeat, and I’ve got my fingers crossed that it gets picked up again next season!

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*I will admit, I watched ABC’s The Deep End while it was on and really enjoyed it.  But that was more like Grey’s with lawyers than it was an actual legal show.  I like watching Lifetime’s Drop Dead Diva for the same reason.  It’s not really a legal procedural, so much as a drama that happens to be about a lawyer.

**You can watch Kathy Bates’s delightful delivery yourself by going to Hulu.com or NBC.com and looking up the episode “Send in the Clowns.”  Her closing starts at about 31 minutes.  It really is worth watching, even if you're not interested in the show, if just to note that the most important thing you can do is capture the jury's attention.

It's A Beautiful Day

I learned my caffeine routine in a
foreign country.  

Oh, springtime.  The days are getting longer, the population is becoming twitterpated, and every group in law school is having a very special networking event.  I'm getting tired of having to dress at 9 am for an evening event that doesn't start until 6 pm.  My feet are longing to be in sneakers and I don't feel like constantly checking my hair to make sure it hasn't turned into a frizzy mess.

Especially since the frizzy mess is an inevitability.

On days like these, I need a little something to ground me in the whirlwind.  Maybe you do too.  And may I suggest routine?

Sure, everybody says a routine is boring, but I don't necessarily mean you should do the same exact thing every day.  Rather, pick something that makes you feel normal and sane and make it into a ritual of sorts.  For instance, the first thing I do in the morning after my 7:15 wake up is make coffee while I eat breakfast.  After I finish my breakfast, my coffee accompanies me throughout my morning until I brush my teeth at 8:35 am, right before I leave for class.  That full hour of caffeinating myself while I get ready for class keeps me from jumping out of bed and flying off the handle.

After my classes and other meetings are done for the day, I come home and do my reading for the following day, hopefully finishing before 7 pm, when all my favorite sitcoms come on.  At that point, I either go to the gym for a long run/workout while watching tv, or I decide that I'm too tired for exercise and just watch television from the comfort of my bed.  Regardless, I spend the rest of the night taking care of myself, dealing with personal matters, and playing catch up from the day.  The last thing I do is take a long, hot shower to get rid of the last 16 hours and start the new day fresh and clean.  Depending on what the next day looks like, I make a to-do list for the following day just before bed.  

Routine isn't necessarily about doing the same thing over and over, but rather about doing familiar sorts of things daily.  Even my daily coffee doesn't need to be coffee, sometimes it's orange juice if I feel scurvacious.*  It's like the way I always keep my keys on the hook by the door:  It's not because I want to know exactly where my keys are,**  it's because looking for my keys causes me to panic and feel insecure.  

So find your own routine.  Listen to your favorite song every night before bed, or do your multiplication tables in the shower.  Call your mom at lunch, or check your favorite website first thing in the morning when you know it updates.***  Do something that makes you feel in control of your own life, and prevents that feeling of being too exhausted to live.  

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a cup of coffee to drink before I have to brush my teeth at 8:35.

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*Adjectival form of having scurvy

**Okay, it's a little bit that.

***I know it's this one.

The Day After Tomorrow

Is it just me, or is the first week back after Spring Break awful?  Winter break is three weeks long, and by the time it's over, you're about ready to go back.  Spring Break is one week long and when it comes time to go back, you feel as though you're being dragged back kicking and screaming.  Seriously, it's not like I even got to DO anything.*

The worst part is how you think, "Okay, I'm going to be really busy today, so I need to stay on schedule and keep moving through."  The thing is, I'm NOT that busy.  I even made a to-do list, but I don't have THAT much more to do than I did before Spring Break.  Two more activities.  Two.  That actually fit into my schedule fairly well.  It just all feels like too much.  I even woke up before 7 am solely because I was worried** that I would miss my first class because I overslept.

I also realized this morning that FINAL EXAMS start in a month.  You're welcome.

In other words, if I can stop myself from having an unnecessary stress-related heart attack until Thursday at noon, I will consider the whole week a win.

Please address all questions or complaints about the brevity of Spring Break to management in the comment box below.  Thanks!

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*I did get to go see The King's Speech.  It was super amazing.
**Also possibly because I've been on Eastern time for 10 days now, so my body was pretty sure it was almost 8 o'clock.

I LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This has pretty much been me all week.
(This is actually my aunt's dog.)

Last year on spring break, I went to a group exercise class which made me so sore that I quite literally could not walk (without looking like an old lady) for three days.  This year I ended up with a stomach virus, which was introduced to me by my mother, who carried it home from the little plague rats she teaches.

Today I am finally able to return to my normal state of being.  (Yesterday, going to the library for five minutes absolutely exhausted me.  I had to come home and take a nap.)  But that brings me to my point today:

Spring break is not about getting ahead or being the best at everything.  Spring break is a time to play catch up and to lay in bed for three days feeling miserable and making your mom bring you various forms of sport beverages.  (I requested pedialyte; I got gatorade.)

I admit, when I go home to see my family, I am a great big baby about EVERYTHING.  I let my mom make my meals, I don't clean my bedroom, and I make special grocery requests.  I even let my mother do my laundry, which she hasn't done since I was sixteen years old.

But for serious, I live five minutes from this thing.

And what do I do?  I sit on the couch, work on job applications, go shopping, and watch a ridiculous amount of tv.  So really, being sick wasn't that much of a change from my normal spring break anyway.

But I'm doing all of it for a very good reason:  When I leave, my mother won't miss me.  Nope, no empty nest syndrome here!  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get dressed to go see The King's Speech.  Which I will not be paying for.

Why would I want to go anywhere else for spring break?