I’m taking Professional Responsibility this semester. It’s a required class that covers the rules of ethics regarding lawyers in preparation for the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam, which everyone has to pass in order to be admitted to the bar.

As in all law school classes, most of the cases and hypos we discuss fall right on the boundaries between rules, where the decisions are most difficult. It’s hard for me to say how often ethical dilemmas like these come up in practice, but for some of these, once in a career is enough to destroy a person.

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I’ve got a few dozen balls in the air at the moment. On the one hand, having so much to do stresses me out, but on the other hand, most of those balls are pretty damn awesome, which makes the day-to-day work a little more pleasant.

Grand Taiko. It’s this weekend! Can you believe it? I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas. Yesterday’s set-change practice was made tense by a couple of unnecessarily-last-minute decisions, but all in all, we are SO ready for this show. Loading, spiking, and tech rehearsal Wednesday, dress rehearsal Thursday, performance Friday and Saturday.

I’m especially excited about our brand new song, Hanadokei. I helped write it a tiny bit, and I get to play in it*. It’s the most exhausting song in the whole set, for me at least, but it’s so much fun to play. You’ll love it.

Because you’re gonna be there, right? Miller Outdoor Theatre, this Friday and Saturday, 7:30 PM? That’s what I thought.

Wedding Planning. We’re thinking early 2011, so it’s still a year and half away, but I’m already deep into the planning. I’m discovering that my mother has a strong vision of what my wedding will look like, and it’s not much like mine. Getting married by a friend or relative instead of a “real” minister? Disappointing. A dress in any color other than white? Even light gray? Disappointing. A wedding palette of yellow, gray, and black**? Disappointing.

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Instead of throwing out scattershot comments on my life over the last month (month!), I’ll talk a little about OCI.

OCI (On-campus interviewing) is the way many incoming 2Ls (that’d be me) get their 3L summer jobs, and it’s the way some 3Ls line up their first jobs after graduation. In case you skimmed that last sentence, that means that a couple weeks from now, in AUGUST, I’ll be interviewing for jobs that start, at the earliest, next MAY. A bit insane, no? Does any other profession do this?

When I start my 3L summer job, I will have twice the law school experience I have now. Don’t employers want to see my fall semester grades? See how well I handle journal work? Maybe they’re just as frustrated with the situation as I am.

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For two weeks now, Houston’s been hotter than … well, a mild fever. Which is hot, as air goes. And despite the lack of rain, it’s still a wet, heavy heat. At least the drought is keeping the mosquitoes at bay. Biking to work has become a somewhat icky endeavor; I’ve learned to bring an extra shirt to change into when I get there.

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I saw a car today with three bumper stickers: a Mac apple, a Houston Astros sticker, and a sticker that looked like those oval country/vacation spot stickers with initials in them but actually stood for “Jesus Freak.” I don’t know why the combination struck me as odd, but I kind of want to meet this person.

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Browsing the internet on my lunch break*, I noticed that I’ve been slacking on the blogging front lately. So here I am.

I took Sam to the vet this morning for a check-up and a squirt of something-something vaccine up the nose. I told the vet one of his eyes had been red off and on lately, but it hadn’t seemed to bother him too much. She took him into the back for a tear test and found out that my poor puppy is making almost no tears and has horribly dry eyes. And his cruel, cruel mother had let him suffer all this time. She didn’t say that second part out loud.

So now I have a tube of goop to squirt into his eyes once a day. I have to hold his eye open and squeeze a line of goo the consistency of Vaseline onto the surface of his eyeball. The vet techs managed to do it with two of them holding him still—I can’t wait to try it at home by myself. I can only hope he’ll understand how soothing the nice happy goop is and come running for it every morning. Hey, it could happen.

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My sleep schedule, such as it was, got all shot to hell when I stayed up all Monday night before the Property exam condensing an Emanuel’s book and typing it into my notes. This may well be the absolute worst way to study for an exam, but when you’ve put it off all semester and the prof doesn’t allow commercial outlines, sometimes you find yourself in an unsavory position.

Around 3:30 in the morning I got to a section on mortgages, and I didn’t recall us talking in class about mortgages in any depth, so that bit of my outline looks like this (pretend it’s indented properly):

C. Financing Devices: Mortgages, Deeds of Trust, and Installment Contracts

1. christ i hope this doesn’t come up on the test

First question? “If Bart mortgages his house to Mort, and then Bart sells the property to Pam….” Argh.

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Our three back-to-back weekends of taiko performances wrapped up with Saturday’s pushing-the-hot-end-of-bearable show at the Dragonboat Festival. The organizers moved the festival from Buffalo Bayou to Sugar Land at the last minute due to flooding on the Bayou, with the happy result that instead of pushing our drums up and down a steep hill, we only had to drag them across a dozen yards of grass. I wouldn’t mind a bit if the festival folks made this change permanent.

And it’s just in time that our spring season ends, because I have four finals coming up in the next two weeks, starting on Wednesday. They happen to come in order of increasing difficulty, at least as I see them now. Writing, the easiest final of all (because writing the brief was hard enough), was two weeks ago. I’ll go through my thoughts on the rest, not because you care, but because later I’d like to know how I felt about these exams before I saw them.

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Jonathan Coulton, anyone? I’d have that song playing right now if I weren’t in class, because I feel wonderful this morning. Not sure why, though.

It could be the four taiko sets we performed this weekend at the Houston Japan Festival. I spent two whole days outdoors hanging out in the lovely Japanese gardens, playing drums, moving drums on and off and on and off and on and off the stage, eating yummy food, drinking tapioca tea, and perfecting my sunburn.

It could also be that I’ve switched from taking my Lexapro in the evening to taking it in the morning. The doctor said it might make me sleepy and recommended that I take it before bed, which I’ve always done, but lately I’ve been having trouble sleeping through the night. Every night I wake up at least two or three times, and sometimes it takes me up to an hour to go back to sleep. If I lie down in the morning after I get back from walking Sam, I will fall asleep within five minutes and sleep through noon. I’ve missed many a morning class this way, and even a few in the afternoon.

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The Tennessee trip was FANTASTIC. The bus gave us its fair share of problems, and we lost a little sleep, but both shows went great and we had a blast. High point of the trip: getting to stay in the same hotel three nights in a row, or maybe the professional massages we got on our day off. Low point: no hot tub in the hotel. Who doesn’t have a hot tub?

I’ll be editing together a video or two about the trip. I hope I can get it all done in the next few days, before finals swallow me up and memories of the trip start to fade into the fog of the recent past.

I also got my brief turned in thanks to my partner from class, who printed out the pdf I emailed her from Memphis at 3:00 Monday morning and turned it in for me. (Thanks Elizabeth!) It’s hard to believe that LRW is practically over, maybe because this semester I spent the last few days before the due date rocking out with taiko instead of going OMGBRIEFBRIEFBRIEF non-stop.

And there’s more rocking out to be done: This weekend is the Houston Japan Fest at Hermann Park*, and then the next Saturday we’re playing at the Dragonboat Festival at Allen’s Landing. Come see us? You should.

Sigh, I’m on such a taiko high right now. I love practicing, I love performing, I love travelling, and I love my taiko family. I’m afraid I might explode from all the happy-making…maybe I should tone it down a bit so I don’t crash hard once all the big shows are over. Hmmm…nah, gonna keep living it up. Taiko on!

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* I’ll be there for all the Kaminari shows, 1:00 and 4:40 on Saturday and 11:15 and 4:15 on Sunday.

I interrupt this hiatus in my blog posting to let you know that I’ll likely be posting even LESS often for the next two weeks. My appellate brief, worth eighty percent of my Legal Research and Writing grade, is due next Thursday*, and all I have so far is a sketch of an outline and a list of cases to read more closely.

I have a conference with my professor tomorrow afternoon, so I figure today is a fantastic time to start putting some serious effort into this thing. With only one weekend between now and the due date and 20 pages to conjure up out of this thick stack of cases, I’ll barely have time to eat, sleep, read blogs, check Facebook, keep up with my YouTube subscriptions, and update my Twitter feed.

I’ve just removed Solitaire from my computer, so who knows, maybe I’ll post MORE here for lack of a more absorbing way to procrastinate. It’s a crazy world.

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* The actual due date is the Monday after next, but that weekend I’ll be on a taiko road trip (squee!) to perform at the Nashville Cherry Blossom Festival. What better reward for finishing a brief, eh?