This long, relaxing, commitment-sparse summer is the perfect time to initiate the planning stages of Operation: Win at Law School. It’s clear that with the amount of reading, organizing, and personal responsibility law school will bring, I’ll need a “productivity system” more effective than my current version, which consists of the following steps:

1. Write appointments and due dates in my planner.
2. Do homework assignments when/if I get around to them, unless they’re ungraded or the grading scale is so “curved” that I’m already guaranteed an A.
3. For exams, gather notes the night before. Study notes the morning of, preferably while walking to class.
4. Go to class.

Step 4 is the key to the whole system. This may seem obvious, but it took me about four years to discover it. When I go to class, everything else takes care of itself, and college looks a lot like high school. So, if you’re about to enter college, take it from me: you can skip all the fancy motivational “College for Dummies” books and just GO TO CLASS. I swear, no one should ever put me in charge of an undergrad orientation. It would last about fifteen seconds.

(more…)

Things look a bit different around here, I realize. (If they don’t, you probably need to refresh and/or clear your computernet thing.) Don’t get used to it, though, because they’re about to get differenter.

I We John just updated my version of WordPress for the first time since I created this blog THREE YEARS AGO. We skipped all the way from 1.5.1.3 to 2.5. Dealing with comment spam had been unbearable for months now—I get about a hundred spam comments a day, and none of the plugins worked because I was so far behind the times, so I’ve been sorting through them all by hand to pick out the occasional real live commenter.

Updating, in addition to its many benefits, meant that my theme reverted back to its original version, before I painstakingly (because I am bad at CSS, not because the changes I made were all that complicated) tweaked the color scheme and added the rhino header. I could recover my modified theme, but I figure that after three years, it’s probably time for a change.

I could’ve used the default blue theme as a placeholder, but if anyone new stumbles across my blog, I’d rather have them think I *tried* to spice up my site design and did poorly than think I didn’t try at all. Hence the red red RED theme, which was the first half-decent one I saw on wordpress.net, and which will be gone as soon as I can come up with something I like better. So you can expect to be seeing it for the next six months.

How long has it been since I last posted? A month? Everybody’s stopped reading, right? Awesome. Now I can talk about you behind your backs.

The thing is, I had finals, so I took a week or two off, and after that I’d get back to blogging, but then I graduated, which was a Big Life Change (in that my employability spiked dramatically), so naturally my next post HAD to be about graduation, but that would be a LONG post, and an IMPORTANT post, and really what’s the point of starting all that today when I can eat cake and take a nap instead. You see?

But no, that’s not how blogging works. Blogging (the hacky way I do it, at least) is about jotting things down as they happen, however dull and poorly-written the results might be. Planning, gathering resources, editing…those are for chumps. And professionals.

(more…)