potpourri

At last,two weeks of respite. It's been a long time coming, and it will go so fast. I laid in bed til 9 this morning, decadence for me. Perhaps all this free time is detrimental-I can't seem to turn my mind off and just be.

Why are we not satisfied for more than a minute at any given time? Happiness, contentment, fleeting at best. When I am alone, I desire the company of others. When I am with them, I long for a retreat to my solitary place.

I wonder at the madness in the world, perpetrated by humans upon each other. Sometimes it's clearly evil, and at others, the perpetrator is a victim too. Where is the sense of it? How do we then plan? It's folly to think we are immune.

And still we try.

of mice and me

Funny what a mouse can do. Or just a hint of its existence. I don't mind ants, spiders, any number of other things. But any sign of a rodent in my house, and I'm reduced to helplessness and wanting rescue, a condition that only makes me feel bereft and, well, helpless. Which condition I cannot tolerate. Shit.

Ok, so I'm going to the store for mouse traps tomorrow, since I can't seem to find any here. And I will be so pissed off when I actually have to deal with a corpse, or god forbid, a not yet dead mouse in a trap. Irrational, childish, absurd. And yet.

time to pay the piper

You may have gathered that I like studying the law, I like law school, and all that goes with it (except paying tuition). Ah, but today is a different day. It's exam day once again. In a couple of hours, my Con Law mid-term will commence. It is hard to explain the gamut of feelings I have on days like this. Just 10 minutes ago, I was calm, sure and at ease, and now I'm nigh unto panic. Back and forth I go. Trying to remember that I've done what I can, time to just do it. It's hard to describe the way these exams loom so large in our minds. They are the sum total of our grades, nothing else matters. Even so, I don't quite know why they have such capacity to club us over the head. If asked, I would normally say I like exams. That was before law school, of course. I'll like this one too in about 5 hours. I know this is essentially self inflicted.

There are a few things I try to do for my law school exams, to reduce the anxiety, or at least manage it. Each of us has our own formula, or routine, sort of like the baseball player that always wears his lucky socks.

First, I go to work. I work from 6 or 7 am until 12 or so, and it helps keep my mind busy, and calms me. Throughout the afternoon, I review my notes, not to try to memorize anything, but to keep it fresh in my mind. I listen to music on my ipod, I check Facebook, read emails, make phone calls, etc.

About an hour before the exam, when the anxiety starts to peak, I set up my laptop, then walk circuits around the halls of the school, listening to music and just trying to keep my core outline in my head.

When I sit down with the exam, I do two things. Before I open the test and start reading, I write that core outline down on the scratch paper at my table. That way, at some point when I either freak out, or can't think of anything else to discuss, I have something to go back to. The other thing I do is remember that I have done hard things before, and I can do this. I just have to do it. There really isn't an alternative if I want to continue on this path, so this thing just needs done.

Nothing magic about my approach, to be sure. Not exactly life skills, but right now it's about surviving this evening. Everything else is in abeyance.

I don't want to know this

Law school has taken me in some surprising directions. At all times it has stretched, challenged and taught me. I had a class this semester in legal research. The idea was to learn how to use legal databases like Lexis Nexis and WestLaw more effectively, and indeed, I did learn those things. But what a surprise to learn so much more.

I just finished my pathfinder for my research class. Ok, I didn't finish, because these things are never done, but I have stopped working on it. The topic ended up being about the homeless and the current state of the law regarding issues that affect homeless persons.

I know the reasons behind poverty, homelessness and related issues are complicated. I see no easy answers, only more questions. I feel the guilt that you might expect at reading and writing about being wretchedly poor, sleeping on the streets, spending one's whole day figuring out how to get fed, warm and safe; all while sitting in my warm house, with a full cupboard and health insurance. Don't get me wrong, I worry on a regular basis about money-how to pay for law school, hoping my car will last until school is done, and how I'm going to survive. But I have some prior experience of being poor, and the sense to understand the difference in what I worry about now as opposed to what the guy who sleeps across the street in the overgrowth worries about. So many people make Hobson's choices every day in order to survive, and the well-off stand in judgment, cloaked in self-righteousness.

Knowledge is painful, it's responsibility, it is a choice all in itself. Tonight it all feels like too much.