(insert appropriate witty hip hop quote about being back and/or returning, perhaps also involving denigration of suckas and decrying any and all instances of move fakin’)
So it’s been a hop, skip, and a jump away from a while since I posted anything. It should not be surprising to anybody if I blame starting law school for that drought. I don’t want to make excuses, but god, if you’re still checking back and reading this, the least I owe you is an explanation.
Everyone says the first year of law school is hard, but I thought I was ready. I’d studied hard and done well on the LSAT; I’d just study hard and do well in class. I guess that formula is simple enough that it might yet hold true, but the experience couldn’t be less familiar. The LSAT just demanded that I lock myself in a room every Sunday for ten weeks and take a practice exam. It was a matter of discipline more than concentration, raw hours clocked rather then focused analysis. I’m learning that law school is actually much more than just a big logic game of shuffling seating arrangments and allocating people between vehicles; perhaps they should make wedding planners take the LSAT instead of law students. Law school seems to be instead a constant game of hide-and-go-seek between you and the professors, where you duck down and try not to get called on when you don’t know your shit and run around trying to tag them when you do. Once you get on call, by whichever side’s machinations, you get to go play on the Problematizing Seesaw, where you vacillate back and forth between clear rules and borderline cases as long as the professor stays amused. Afterwards you resolve to be a better seesawer next time, so you spend the evening going back and forth on your own imaginary seesaw, but it never feels quite like the real thing.
The end result is that after a month of school I feel a little dizzy. I think I’ve kept up alright, but my brain feels out of focus. I can’t get the two hemispheres to converge on any one idea. I have some faith that I’ll get my groove back soon enough, but I didn’t realize how out of practice I was. Three years without any significant intellectual challenges has built up a lot of cruft, and I’ve been getting by on a neat turn of phrase and a furrowed brow for too long. Big words don’t impress anyone in law school; neither do lazy analogies or unwarranted assumptions. It’s definitely going to take my focused and sustained attention over the rest of the year to get my domepiece back to fighting weight.
So I’m going on a diet. Not a food diet (though I’ve recently switched to Diet Coke after years of resistance, which should save me a few bajillion calories a year), but an information diet. I’ve decided that I really have to cut down on distractions, and right now I try to be knowledgable about too many things. I now have 99 feeds in my aggregator; there’s no way I can stay up on all of them and have a chance to be even a passably good law student. It’s nice to be well rounded, but I really feel like it’s time to stop sacrificing depth for breadth. If I need to get up to speed on something, I’ll do some research on it; no more trying to be preemptively informed.
That said, everyone needs to have a hobby. I’m not capable of banishing everything but Law from the life of my mind. The other thing I’m allowing myself is Music. It may be a cop out, since there was no way I was going to stop listening to music, but I’m going to try to actually devote more time to it. I think if I have a default thing to do when I’m not doing Law things, I’ll be more focused generally. My project is going to be an MP3 blog, similar to those under the Music heading in the sidebar on the left. The idea is no more complicated than me posting a track or two and some thoughts about them every week or so, but I think it will be get me (and hopefully you) more engaged with my collection and music in general. Ideally, I’ll be able to convince some others to join me in the endeavor, so I (we) can be up on what they’re up on.
So keep an eye out, and don’t forget to peep our brother publications, Beer Burgers and Dsquared, which have been publishing with renewed vigor as of late.
evan :: Oct.12.2005 :: Notices :: 3 Comments »
I know what you mean. My brain has turned to cream cheese over the past three years. I try to make it better by reading fancy books, but the miracle of tabbed browsing is determined to keep me down.
I guess this means we should be nice and stop bombarding with you links to incredibly pointless shit on the interweb. And I’m psyched about this MP3 blog - I’m already thinking about what’s going up first…
Ah, the self-indulgence of a 1L. Would that I were so innocent again.
Hey, thanks for the shoutout. And I know what you mean too. If anything, that sense of disorientation hasn’t really gone away for me, and this is my fourth year in grad school. In my case, it’s largely a matter of trying to get adjusted to the level of hyper-professionalized, mercenary stuff that goes on in grad school. Which is not to say we have any more of it than any other profession, because I doubt that’s the case. But it is to say, as you seem to be saying about yourself, that I was a little naieve when I went in. I thought I’d be getting closer to life’s real truth by studying great texts and great ideas written by great people. And this does happen on occasion, and when it does it’s great and it justifies my being here, but there’s so much other shit.
At the risk of busting out a tired maxim, I think the trick is to stay focused on what made you want to do this in the first place and to minimize the extent to which you let the extraneous stuff bother you. I mean that not only as a meta-point, but also on the practical level (maybe this makes me a mercenary too), since the people to whom you have to reach out and make notice you are gonna notice you at your best when you’re devoted to the causes of your conscience. e.g. I’ve never believed in “networking” for its own sake; the professional contacts and letter-writers come as they come, through classes, contacts, etc.