I’ve been doing a lot of drinking by myself lately.
and eating lunch by myself. and studying by myself.

I had no idea grades would change my relationships with other people to the extent that they have.
I came in 60 out of 158. Not disastrous by any means. Not good. Not where I wanted to be. But not a complete disaster.

My study group voted me off the island because I was the only one that didn’t win any book awards.
They were really passive-aggressive about it too. I’d ask if we were going to lunch or if we could meet up about something or when the next meetup was and get these really vague, noncommittal answers and then find out a few days later that they’d met without me. The other day as we were leaving Contracts I asked what people were doing for lunch and was told they were busy and couldn’t have lunch with me because they were having a study group lunch at Napper Tandys. As in, I’m neither in their study group nor invited to lunch.

Toward the end of fall semester I’d started dating a guy in another section. Things had been going really well. He gave me a really nice piece of jewelry for Christmas and we talked every day over break, sometimes for hours. Once grades came back he started being really flaky. He dumped me, citing as a major reason the fact that his grades were good enough to put a transfer within reach, so there was no point in continuing to see me since he was going to be transferring to a better school at the first available opportunity.

It never really occurred to me how clique-y law school is, and it definitely never bothered me until now.

I’m keeping myself busy with my job search. I have over 30 resumes and cover letters out as of today, and had my first interview last week for a job in Charlotte.  I’m supposed to have another phone interview for a different gig at some yet-to-be determined time later this week. In a perfect world, I’ll land something in Raleigh that’s actually paid. I don’t want to have to eat the cost of my apartment here and I don’t want to have to work multiple night and weekend jobs.

In some ways it’s been really hard to keep my motivation up. It’s easy to get demoralized when you realize that none of the people around you are your friends.

At the same time though I want to work harder this semester and kick all their asses just out of spite.

That’s the last several trips to the saucer combined into one list. I hit 50 beers at my knitting group over the weekend. I’m a quarter of the way to the plate. And I get a free pint next time I go which will likely be Sunday for knitting again.
The’re starting to change out all the seasonal beers and bring in the winter-y things. I wasn’t a huge fan of the Highland Cold Mountain, it’s a darker heavier beer than I’m used to.

The Pipeline Porter on teh other hand was a huge surprise. I had that on Friday afternoon. I’d been planning to spend the afternoon discussing contracts with a classmate and we changed the venue to the saucer. I’m not generally into porters but this one was really good. It wasn’t bitter at all and it had coffee in it. I had to be talked into it but it was really good.
So was discussing contracts, which proved to be really invaluable when I was called on in class on Monday.

As of now I’ve been called on 3 times in contracts, twice in property, and once in Torts. I still have yet to be called in Constitution & courts which kind of scares me still, particularly since I sit in the 2nd row, dead center – I’m always right in his line of sight. This is the guy that made a girl cry the first week.

This week has been rough. I’m taking a break right now and watching Glee instead of doing work. I’m also feeling slightly guilty about it because I should still be working.
My LRW prof kind of makes me want to tear out my hair. We ended up not getting back our second assignment until over a week after all the other sections. And when we did she informed us that our section had actually done *TOO WELL* so she had to curve everybody down. I *SHOULD* have had an 89. But I got curved down 6 points to an 83.  Considering that none of the other sections had a curve, let alone one that screwed everyone, I’m pissed. We still have to compete with everyone else on class rank and they’re being graded easier essentially. It’s infuriating.

We also didn’t get our memo assignment back until like a week later than everybody else which was annoying. Worse still is it means I’ve only got two days to do my final draft since we have to meet our professors first to talk about our rewrites, and the only meeting time i could get was two days before it’s due. This is really not ok, because not only is it 20% of the final grade in the class, it’s also the only writing sample we’ll have graded in time to use as a writing sample for job applications for the summer.

It’s not just me, I know it’s everybody. It’s sinking in that we’re less than a month out from finals. Everyone in my LRW class is pissed off and hates our prof.

Today we ended up being basically triple booked between a review session with our teaching scholar, a review session with our Con. & Courts prof, and a mandatory schoolwide professionalism lecture (the least useful option which unfortunatley won out). It’s also been cold and rainy and disgusting out for the last two days which doesn’t help.

I’m ready for the weekend even if it only means reading, CALI lessons, and outlining.

You know you’ve got problems when youre having a rough week and it’s only Tuesday.

Even so, I have to look on the bright side, I’ve managed to avoid getting swine flu so far, despite the fact that it seems to be hitting my section particularly hard. Last week the majority of my study group was out, then our contracts prof. got it, and there are still a few people out with it now.
Hand sanitizer has become ubiquitous, a lot of people are avoiding the library and studying elsewhere, and section 4 people are like lepers. Seriously. In LRW today somebody asked me which section I was in and when I told her, she refused to sit by me because she doesn’t want to get swine flu.
Not only do I not have swine flu, I won $50 on trivia last night.

We had our property quiz this morning.  The results made me feel like an idiot, especially considering how much time I put in studying.

It was to the point where I was having dreams about property questions the night before. I seriously woke up to the alarm this morning and said to myself  “was I really just dreaming about alternative contingent remainders?” (didn’t I used to dream about more interesting things?)

This is after a weekend of disappointing personal setbacks. I honestly went into the quiz thinking property is easily my best class. If  I can’t score at least in the high 90s on this I’m doing something wrong. I enjoy it, plus I don’t have the distractions of a personal life.

At this point, school is all I have, and if I can’t do well at that, I’ll just hate myself.

He posted the results immediately and I had like an 84. I freaked. I missed two questions because of admittedly stupid mistakes and second guessing myself.  The other two I felt really sure on. But apparently everybody else missed them too, and he’s not counting one because there was a typo in the answer key.

I still havent gotten the last LRW assignment back, and I’m worried about that one. They tend to be nitpicky. LRW’s another class where I feel like theres no excuse for not doing well. Contracts is another story.

In the Princeton Review’s survey of law students around the country, we’re at #3 on the list of who spends the most time studying, at almost 6 hours per day. I gotta say its about right.
MWF  I’m done with class at noon and I’m usually reading/working/etc. in the library till 530 or 6. TR I’m done at 11, usually leave the building around 5. Weekends I’m in the library by noon and there till 5 at least.

I don’t even really think about it all that much. I don’t miss tv anymore. My sewing machine’s been gathering dust for months. The only time I do any knitting is if I’m at a knitting group.

I also haven’t been getting out to the saucer as much lately, a trend this blog sadly reflects.

I can’t believe the semester’s more than half over. That fact alone is more than a little terrifying because it means exams are that much closer. Study groups are getting more intense accordingly. My group spent 3+ hours on 3 pages worth of property hypos yesterday. I honestly thought before school started that I’d probably be bored out of my mind in property but it’s actually probably my favorite class. And after the last few classes and study groups we’ve had lately I feel like I actually might even be kinda good at it.

• Carolina Pale Ale

This week

• Old Dominion Octoberfest
• Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin
• Breckenridge Autumn Ale

Soooo I’m past 40 beers now on my quest and I’ve been really slack about updating.

You didn’t miss much, just a lot of schoolwork, pumpkin ales, and Octoberfest beers . I’ll post an up to date list behind a cut at the end probably.

As for school they’re keeping us busy, as can be expected.

My section had it’s first dropout and first hospitalization of the year last week. No, the hospitalization wasn’t for a nervous breakdown, it was for appendicitis.

We’ve figured out in our constitution class that the prof has a pretty predictable pattern with regards to calling on people. He only calls on women and he’s going alphabetically. On Friday he was up to M. I’m P, so I’m expecting to get nailed this week. At least it will be nice to have it over with.  This is the only class where I haven’t been called on yet.

We’re halfway though the semester apparently, which is sort of scary. People are starting to freak out.
If it makes any sense at all I’m freaking out precisely because I’m not freaking out. I’m worried about not being worried. Like I know it will all catch up to me later and I’ll be a complete basketcase come November.

The 40 beers I’ve had to date…

I had to include the squiggly section symbol now that I’ve made a keyboard shortcut for it.
I’m so proud of myself for this knowledge, I’m going to just keep doing it §§§§…done.
But now I can make a squiggle successfully ever time I have to cite something from the restatement or treatises or anything else that requires the use of the squiggle.

We’re almost done with week two, and it’s going well but you can see the claws are starting to come out.

Con Law has us all running scared because our prof spent the entire hour on Wednesday ripping this one girl a new one.  Also for accusing the entire section of not reading, being lazy, and apparently later badmouthing us to the other sections.

In LRW today everybody was talking about another classmate’s listserv (ab)use and inferred bigheaded-ness after he sent the entire class a ridiculously long and rather superfluous email around lunchtime. I held my tongue. I think he’s a good guy if a little naieve.

About half my section had lunch at Char Grill today and discussed our mutual post-Con Law shell shock, and yesterday’s mandatory professionalism lecture, which would have been more interesting had it been shorter. I just don’t have that kind of attention span at 3 in the afternoon. The general consensus was that feigning attentiveness got even harder when the speaker spent at least a half hour on Q&A, most of it with this one guy in the front row who wouldn’t stop asking what seemed like superfluous unnecessary questions.  Total gunner. We all wanted to go home.

I spent the last several days compiling a list of how much law school resembles my high school experience:

1. My backpack weighs easily half of what I do, and my back is killing me. Though there are a lot of people with wheeled bags¹.
2. An unnerving number of people in my class actually went to my high school.
3. One of the chief duties of student government – prom planning
4. Also, the fact that there’s prom?
5. I can count the number of other Democrats on one hand.
6. I can count the nonwhite people on one hand.
7. This is the first time I’ve lost a student government race since high school.
8. Guys actually talk to me now, unlike in college.
9. When somebody does something stupid/ridiculous/unsavory over the weekend, everybody knows about it by Monday morning.

I can’t say I mind a ton (aside from the back pain and lack of diversity). I actually kind of liked high school (again, back pain and social homogenous-ness aside).
No, I wasn’t cool, far from it. I was more like queen of the nerds. But I kind of enjoyed being queen of the nerds.

So it appears for the moment at least that I’m settling in socially to at least some degree.
Academically I’m getting into a groove, working out a strategy.
We have this research assignment for legal writing due next week. All 150+ of us have the same assignment and we’re not allowed to use Lexis or Westlaw. The assignment is more like a scavenger hunt than a paper, they ask you to find things in certain books and say, give the citation to a case that appears on a certain page of a given book.
If it weren’t for the fact that there are over 150 of us fighting over the same handfull of books, I’d think it’s kinda fun, and probably the most useful thing we’ve done in that class up to now. Problem is you spend the bulk of your time chasing down books and then stalking people in the library to see when they’re done with the book you (and 6 people in line behind you) need.
I got so frustrated with this on Sunday afternoon that I got in my car and drove to the library in Chapel Hill, which proved to be one of the best ideas ever. I got done in an hour what I couldn’t do in an entire afternoon at my own school. Now all I have to do is type up my answers and turn it in.

¹ In high school if somebody had a rolling bag like this it was like an invitation to get the shit kicked out of you. Consequently I still kind of think less of the many people that have them, even though I realize they’re smarter than me, and their backs probably hurt a lot less.

I seem to have survived my first two days of school with sanity intact, apartment habitability issues notwithstanding.
The landlord did come today and fix both the drains and the windows, the latter being crucial to the former, because whatever industrial drain-clog-buster he used had the side effect of making the ENTIRE BUILDING smell like bigfoot hung out here all day after having eaten Taco Bell. All afternoon whenever one of the neighbors came home from work, they could be heard in the hallway going “WTF, WHO FARTED?”
But the drain works now. And the windows open.
As for classes, I”m caught up for all of tomorrow’s reading and started on Thursday’s, hooray.  Torts is fun and interesting, which helps since she seems to be assigning more reading and more cases to brief than any of my other professors so far. Contracts is confusing at this point because I don’t fully understand what constitutes consideration and what doesn’t.

Since I got all my reading done for tomorrow and started on the reading for Thursday, I went to trivia, where team Risky business took home another tab for next week, the main deciding question being “what director’s mother uttered the famous line ‘I’ll have what she’s having?’ in When Harry Met Sally”.
I screwed us up, thinking for some reason that it was Penny Marshall, when in fact it was Rob Reiner. *Facepalm*

Still, we took home a $30 tab for 2nd place. I’m not one to complain about free beer.

I’ll close with some choice quotes from “the smiling assassin” in class this morning:

“Property is the most important class. Everything is property. without property you’d be floating naked through a void in space.”

“A student wrote on his course evaluation last year ‘how can you claim to be a professor at a Christian law school when you grade like a Spanish inquisitor possessed by Satan?”

Sunday means two things: Knitting and $2.75 NC pints at the Saucer. Also brunch.
The usual suspects wanted to split a giant bottle of Scrumpy, and we put it on my plate list. I’ve had scrumpy before and it’s delicious.
One of the other wome in the group is from England, and we made it a point to complain to our server about the Saucer’s lack of Strongbow. For a bar that prides itself on having such a wide selection of beers and all, it would just make sense that they’d have it. Especially when there are 3 other bars nearby that also have it on tap (Pour House, Hibernian, Tir Na Nog, all in walking distance, so its not like they don’t distribute it in the US, contrary to what one ill-informed bartender told me.)

I spent the lions share of Saturday reading for Con Law, Contracts, and Property, planning on leaving Torts for Sunday afternoon since I don’t even have torts until Tuesday.

I got together with some people to work on the torts cases at school later on in the afternoon, which I felt was pretty productive. I got to meet another person in my section which is always nice.  We were going to have dinner together on the way home since we live near eachother but then she lost her keys and sort of had a meltdown.
This seemed to be the theme of Sunday for all the people in our little group.

T. Was freaking out because he didn’t know about one of the assignments until the last minute because it wasn’t showing up on blackboard, a problem I’d had myself earlier in the week.

Another girl who I knew from undergrad was in a state of sheer panic because the bookstore was out of the contracts casebook when she went, and she has “professor Mc-Hardass” first thing on Monday. They told her she had to go to Buies Creek to get the book, and when she got there was told that they didn’t have it either. In the meantime she photocopied the cases from someone elses book. I suggested she try calling to see if they’ve got it at UNC, Duke, or Central. How many contracts casebooks could there really be?

Then when I got home I wanted to take a shower. An unfortunate side effect of cutting my hair is it gets greasy looking at the drop of a hat now. I can’t get away with skipping a day of washing it anymore. Some days I find myself having to wash my hair more than once. You needed to know that, I’m sure.
Anyway when I stepped in the shower I noticed I was up to my ankles in nasty used shower water because the tub wasn’t draining at all. I reached for a rubber glove to see if I could just pull out whatever hairball or whatever was blocking it. I did pull a decent sized hairball but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Next I attempted the toilet plunger. That just made this blackish nasty ooze spew out the overflow drain.  Now I wanted to shower even more after having gotten this stuff on me, and yet was in an even worse position as far as actually doing so.
Next step was calling dad, who confirmed that we probably need to just call the landlord to snake out the drain. We need to call her again anyway about the windows that won’t open. In the meantime, I still need to shower, which has a particular urgency since tomorrow’s the first day of actual real classes, and I don’t want my professors’ first impression of me to be “the girl with the B.O. and super-greasy hair.”
What ensued was a weird bird bath situation and washing my hair in the sink to the best of my ability.
The show must go on.

On another wacky note, I kind of wish the sections had like, cool team names or something. I’d kind of want my section to be Ravenclaw or Gryffindor. I also feel really weird about the fact that I’m in law school and referencing Harry Potter. How’d I get to be so old?

For all the raving about the chocolate stout, I just couldn’t get into it. Too strong for me, which I find to be true of stouts in general, but I guess maybe it’s an acquired taste.
Anyway the drinks were on a tab once again, as I’d stopped by the saucer for a plate party I’d been invited to by some 2Ls & 3Ls.
I wasn’t planning on staying long since I had 3 other parties to go to on the same evening.

We’ve finished orientation and spent Friday as a day of service. They divided everybody, including all the faculty, into groups to go work on different projects around Raleigh. My group was working at the Food Bank sorting through donations they got from Harris Teeter. Initially I was exceedingly pissed off at whoever ordered the T-shirts for the event, because whoever did ordered only L and XL. I’m 5’5 and weigh 115, an XL shirt just wasn’t going to fly. Thankfully I had time to cut and resew the thing so it fit.

As for the food bank, I rather enjoyed it, although we stumbled upon questionably large quantities of weird items among the donations, namely a lot of douches, suppositories, and pregnancy tests.

Thursday morning had been spent in a mock class session on the readings from the night before, which happened to be about 3 cases on easements. It took me forever and despite making extensive use of the Black’s Law Dictionary search function on Westlaw, I was still pretty thoroughly confused and kind of terrified of being called on.
As it turned out, the prof picked the guy sitting directly behind me and grilled him for the entire hour. He rocked it though. This had the effect of being both really impressive and making me feel like an idiot for being so lost. This guy is now considered the hero of our class.

We’d gotten an email on the class listserv on Thursday announcing that one of the two fraternities was having it’s welcome party on Friday night at a bar downtown, so people were making plans to pregame for it after the service project.
There are two professional fraternities at school, and from the looks of things all of the upperclassmen are in one of the two. It also seems to be the case that whenever the subject comes up, members of one will relish the opportunity to bash the other. For what it’s worth, the first frat sent out a message weeks ago that their back to school party was being held on the 18th, and had a pretty big presence throughout our orientation events. The second one didn’t even announce their party till the day before it was to occur.

The schedule worked out such that I had time to stop by the plate party at the saucer before the pregame and the party at the bar, so I did. Despite their having invited most of the class of 2012, I was the only 1L to show up, which I didn’t necessarily mind. It was  a pretty small group, and one of the 3Ls at the table asked me how many were in our class.
“I think around 160 or 165.” I said.
“Wow,” she said “that’s a lot. We started with 132. We’re down to about 90 now.”
“You lost that many? What happened to them all?”

“A lot of them flunked out or got kicked out. A lot of people just quit.”
Another guy from her class cut in:
“remember that one chick had a nervous breakdown?”
“What? no she didn’t that’s BS.”

“She did!” he said “She got called on in class and started cursing out her professor. Then she disappeared. My advisor told me it was because she completely lost it. Had to be hospitalized.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize that was what happened to her.”
“yeah, well…our retention rate ain’t the greatest. But psychotic breaks tend to be the exception rather than the rule.”

Yikes.

When asked which professors I had, their answers were only slightly more reassuring.

I was warned that my Constitution & Courts professor was
“A right wing nutjob. Also completely infatuated with Clarence Thomas,”
though I could have guessed this based on the reading assignment for Monday, which consisted almost exclusively of John Locke.
My property prof was referred to as “the smiling assassin,” an apparent reference to the fact that he tends to keep class somewhat lighthearted and amusing but will eviscerate you on the exam.
Nobody had ever heard of the rest of my professors, the consensus being that they’re among the new hires. In the case of Contracts, this is supposed to be a blessing, since the other sections have a professor that is apparently a legendary hardass, on par with Kingsfield in The Paper Chase.

I headed for the pregame party from the saucer, stopping at a convenience store on the way to pick up my contribution to the BYOB affair. That party promised to consist solely of people from my own class, thus it promised to be much less intimidating. I had extended an invitation to one of the girls from my group at the food bank upon realizing that she lived in the same apartment building as the friends that were having the pregame. The two of us killed the 6 pack I bought while everybody else seemed to be drinking 40s.
We hung out for awhile before taking the R Line downtown for the party.

Generally a good time was had by all. Made it home in one piece and in decent enough condition to spend most of Saturday working on Monday’s assignments while wondering what I’ve gotten myself into.