Day 722: High Note

So the first few days of the week I was essentially a miserable wreck as I was desperate to work off a serious sleep deficit, and me being sleep-deprived equals me being grouchy, to say the least. If not grouchy then at least mildly unpleasant and semi-coherent, at the best of times.

I was tired and crazy all day Monday, which means some people received some seriously crazy missives in the aftermath of T&E. I went to FHE for the first time since I've been back in Omaha but skipped out on the marshmallow dodgeball madness and went to watch House with Amber and Angela. We've decided to make it our tradition. Men have Monday Night Football. We have Monday Night House.

Tuesday was all right. After school I set off on a quest to locate a copy of Justice Thomas's memoirs and totally failed. Both the bookstores on 72d had no copies and one of the clerks at the Borders informed us that pretty much all the other bookstores were out too, in case I was wondering. I ran into Dan at the bookstore and we just ended up wandering the shelves together, looking at books and reading quietly to ourselves. It was a surprisingly fun time. At bellydancing we finished learning the entirety of the sword dance song, which is short and generally awesome. While we stretched out afterwards we started to talk costumes, which I'm excited for but am also on a budget that might not support my new hobby. Me and my hobbies.

Yesterday was both the best and worst day ever. I was miserable all morning as I was still a little tired and crabby, and I've decided that this semester is stacked against me. I don't want to be a transactional attorney and all this semester's classes - the heavy ones, at any rate - are all about being a transactional attorney. Our professors insist that even if we do go on to become T&E lawyers or family lawyers we'll need to know this stuff, but what I've heard from my lawyer friends has been distinctly different. There's a bizarre disjunct of class interest and professor effectiveness this semester.

I'm seriously enjoying the T&E textbook and learning the subject, but it's with Lord V, so I just end up penning mad missives or working on fiction. I despise Secured Transactions. Seriously, it makes me want to punch myself in the face. Each day we're assigned a certain number of practice problems from the book, and each problem comes with a list of UCC section to look up. Only the sections aren't listed in numerical order, so I'm flipping backwards and forwards through my statute book and it takes twice as long to look everything up. And then, at the end of horrifying UCC number strings is a little note that tells me to look up additional information within the textbook that is always, without fail, "infra", to wit, after the problem listed. Seriously, it's no good testing me on information I haven't even read yet. I checked out something fierce in Secured yesterday, but I was too frustrated to care. The professor who teaches BA is an awesome guy - he's funny and nice and a good lecturer, but I don't really care about business associations either, and I hate reading ten cases in a row for that class. It's official, though - I've finally given up briefing. Seriously. Unless I know I'm going to get called on for a case, there's no reason to do it since someone else goes over the facts anyway, and I book-brief well enough. As for PR - sometimes the reading material is awesome, but essentially this class is lawyer doomsday, warning us of how awful people are going to be to us if we end up as criminal defense attorneys, how we're all going to becoming raging alcoholics, and that law school will steal our soul and morality with it. I almost think the professor who teaches it regrets ever becoming a lawyer herself and is trying to dissuade us from ever doing it ourselves.

So I was not a happy camper yesterday. But after school I stuck around to get something signed by Justice Thomas. I have a cheap Westlaw copy of the Constitution from first year Con Law, and I had him sign it for me. Before I was hanging around in line with Morgan (older, 3L, LDS, married) and Kainani and some other older students, and we just talked, which was cool. I met Justice Thomas, though. It was bizarre, putting a face to a name I'd seen in a textbook. He was a person, though. He was nice to me - asked me my name and where I was from and gave me encouragement to make it through law school. And I made him laugh, which was sort of random. But he was such a nice person that it seriously made my day. That's the law student in me, though. Most girls my age would wait in a line for hours to see the likes of Robert Pattinson or Zac Efron, but I waited in line for nigh on an hour to see a supreme court justice.

After school I went home and, let's face it, goofed off. I did do my reading for school - more soul-sucking nonsense about how everyone hates criminal defense attorneys, which they do - and I tatted a lot more than one person should. The best part of my day, however, was talking to friends. I chatted with Seirra and Chani over Skype, and Logan called me on the phone, and Ericka called me on the phone. I was up two hours later than I should have been talking to my soul-sister, and it was worth every minute of it. My sisters are the most amazing people in the world, and it kills me whenever someone declares hatred or disdain for them, especially people who don't even know them. My sister Seirra is a gifted and talented poet, a compassionate soul who understands some of my most random quirks, like fandom and the way I write and why. Chani is like Garcia - random, funny, unique, upbeat, and completely unabashed about it all. She's a gifted artist and a generous friend, and I love her immensely. As for Ericka - I don't know that words can fully describe a woman who is a wordsmith par excellence. I just know that she's honorable, funny, loyal, and my best friend.

So yeah, I'm doing pretty awesome, thank you very much.

Now for that pesky task called homework.