The Floo

I don't know if what I actually have is the flu or not. Things have changed so much since I was a kid and my parents were taking care of me when I was sick. Digestive symptoms meant flu way back then. Now it just means stomach bug or bacterial illness. The flu is no just respiratory, fever, and sometimes stomach symptoms. What do I know. All I know is that I couldn't lift my head off the pillow all day and I feel terrible and my tummy is not feeling well. You all know what that means.

(Guess what else I learned on the internets--You can't get a cold by being cold. What's this world coming to?)

So my dear wife is taking care of me. She bought me some Gatorade and Coconut Water to dehydrate me, along with over the counter medicines. For Yang purposes to her Florence Nightingale Yin, she then proceeded to eat Burger King in front of me.

Believe it or not, I didn't care. Didn't want it one bit. Normally I am a fast food junkie but today it just wasn't going to happen.

Hopefully this will go away in the next day or two so that I can enjoy my weekend before school starts next week.

I'm a quitter

So I quit. I gave up. I'm not proud of it, but what can I do? What's done is done.

Lesson learned from all of this - I need writing classes. Just because I understand stuff doesn't mean I can write about it.

11th hour writer's panic

I thought I'd be all ambitious and write a paper to get onto law review but I don't think I'm going to make the deadline.

All those dead trees and hours of reading for nothing.

Rank

I think it's weird that law school is all about the ranks. When I first started learning the law school thing, I was surprised to find out that getting good letter grades might not mean much of anything unless you are high in class rank, and that GPA on a resume might not mean anything either and so you shouldn't include it unless you also have a meaningful class rank.

Gone are the days of running home from school and declaring, "Mom, I got honor roll!"
I guess because law students all get honor roll and so it's not that big a deal.

So I was super happy that I ended up being in the top 3 percent of my class. Ecstatic is more like it.

I've had quite inferiority complex all year, maybe not on this blog, but in my head. I've been competing with kids straight out of college with really impressive educational backgrounds. My parents didn't care either way if I'd gone to college--they were supportive of anything I did just as long as I was happy and supporting myself. So there was never any push for me to take academically challenging classes or to get into elite schools or any of that. I wasn't encouraged to do any sort of extra-curricular activities in preparation for college applications, and my undergrad experience was all state schools/community college.

The people that know me the most know that I've had a lot of crap to go through in my life even before that. I'm not sure I've ever talked about this stuff before online, but I've definitely had an uphill battle early in life with the mental health system. There was a time when my folks contemplated putting me in a residential home and the highest hopes they had for me was to get a minimum wage job and keep it. Maybe to keep my trips to the hospital to a once-a-year minimum. I had mental health case workers, I was on disability, and going nowhere.

It's beyond anyone's wildest dreams that I'd ever be able to finish college, never mind go to law school. Never mind do as well as I did.

Not to get to hokey or anything, but--anyone dealing with mental illness out there--It's a hard life and it probably will always be hard no matter how "normal" your life gets to be. You always have that feeling in the back of your mind that people can tell that you're not normal. You have that fear that you're going to have some sort of mental breakdown or relapse in the middle of school or work and you struggle with wanting to keep your life as safe as possible to avoid being found out like that. Law school is anything but safe in that respect. People judge you by comments you make in class, in study groups, your grades, what school you came from, etc. It's an adverse environment that is more stressful than you can believe. And although I'm sure there are some people at law school that could tell that sometimes I wasn't "quite right" or they might perceive me as being "weird" or "off" - I wasn't the pariah of the school or anything.

And I was able to find some kindred spirits within the school that faced similar issues as me. I wasn't alone in this, and neither were they.

It can feel very lonely, especially when you are going through something tough related to mental illness. If you fall behind in your reading, you're f-ed. If you stop going to class, your f-ed. Sometimes you can't go to class and sometimes you can't read. Dealing with psychotic features and mania and depression and keeping up with your studies, sticking to your student budget, and then coming out on the other end in one piece is a challenge in itself. Never mind the pressures of networking and student events and random law student competitiveness and social obligations that you have to deal with on top of that.

Lucky for me, therapy, medication, and lots of effort and support from friends and family are what got me through this. Lucky for me people in my life believed in me when I didn't and didn't give up on me when I did. Lucky for me my wife knows me better than I know me and knew all along I could do this.

So yeah, I know it's not cool to brag about your grades or rank in law school but I have to do it. Maybe if I see the words on the screen that tell me what I've been through and tell me what I've accomplished that I will start believing in myself automatically. Maybe when I'm feeling insecure and inferior I can go back and read this and stop doubting myself so much. Despite all my imperfections, I can perform as well as the "perfect" people. More than that, maybe the "perfect" people are really "imperfect" like me and I just don't know it.

Check out this article: http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080121/OPINION01/80121029/1055/OPINION

Grades

I'm very happy with my performance this year. I did better than I thought I ever could.

It sucks that in law school it's weird so people don't talk about their grades without getting weird with each other. In undergrad and high school people told what they got and didn't bat an eye. Now it's like, "I did better than expected." or some other cryptic message.

Well here it goes: I'm going to break out of the mold in a chicken-shit sort of way because this is an anonymous forum. I got A's and B's, and hopefully there hasn't been some sort of mistake. Because I'm not giving the grades back.

Poor for the summer

I was one of the lucky one who got my summer work paid for the summer between 1l and 2l. Believe me, $12/hr is lucky. Most of my friends are not being paid at all and working another job on top of their legal job.

The problem is that my student loan money has run out and I have just enough money for this month's small mortgage payment. I get paid Friday but I've only worked a few hours because I just started my summer job, and my large mortgage payment is due on the 1st of the month. It will take me a few weeks to come up with the cash to pay for that. Probably beyond the grace period cutoff date. I called the company and told them about it and they "made a note in the computer." I need to call home retention on Monday and see if they can do anything for me. I've tried applying for the Making Home Affordable programs but right now there's nothing out there for me. I'll be fine once the school year comes again and I have loan money. In the meantime, my wife and I will be rolling change and eating very cheap foods. Rice and beans here we come. In the grand scheme of things, everything will be all right. I'm very lucky to be able to go to school at this point in my life, and I'm also very lucky to be getting paid this summer.

public defender?

So I went to a meeting the other day with several guest speakers a lawyer from the public defenders office gave a presentation about some specific areas that he deals with. I didn't realize how much I missed Criminal Law until I shed a tear and started getting all wistful when he said the words, "Specific Intent Crime."

**sigh**

This makes my choice of taking a bunch of classes next semester that have nothing to do with my interest in Crim. rather painful.