Okay, it’s time to do this. I need to get a few things out of my head and into this little box. Not important things, mind you, just day to day stuff that I’ve been meaning to blog about. This might be a long one.

Thing One: A couple weeks ago my taiko group played at a local community college’s Japan Festival. It was a teeny tiny thing, probably just the school’s Japanese Club and a few community groups they had connections with. The college didn’t advertise it at all—I couldn’t find it mentioned on the internet anywhere, and even the school’s event calendar listed nothing for that day—so our entire audience was pretty much made up of other festival participants, maybe 50 or 60 people.

We were in the “Commons,” a cafeteria-type room with a twenty-foot ceiling. The audience sat on the floor ten feet in front of us. Halfway through the first song, the audience all seemed to react to something at once. A second later, I heard a crash behind me and felt bits of something spray up against the backs of my legs. What? Did someone throw something at us? There wasn’t anything behind us except some chairs and a bunch of our equipment. I looked down and saw broken glass all around my feet.

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It is 11:00 PM on December 7th, and at this very moment it is 71 degrees outside. I shit you not.

It’s supposed to get about thirty-five degrees colder over the next two days, but right now I love Houston so much I can hardly stand it.

I have other things to talk about, really I do, but I also have finals to study for. Finals that count for, oh, one hundred percent of my grade. In every class. My last one is on the 19th.

I’d planned to bury my finished memo and not look at it until after grades came in—I knew that as soon as I looked at it I’d see a slew of obvious mistakes and be disappointed.

But now I’m applying for a part-time job at school, and they want to see a writing sample, which for 1Ls means our memo. I opened it to look it over. First paragraph, blatant comma error. Argh.

The scrimping and abuse I had to put this memo through to get it down to ten pages makes the writing . . . choppy, you could say. Not the best example of my writing. I’m thinking of sending my earlier ungraded memo. In addition? Instead? Hmmm.

Well, kind of. I has a rough draft, which counts for something. I’d hoped to be finished with it earlier so I could spend most of today editing, but what a silly hope that was.

All the work I’ve done up to this point has moved me from an F to maybe a C. I guess technically it’s still an F, actually, because there are stiff penalties for going over the page limit, and my “ten-page” memo is just shy of twenty.

M minus 11.5 hours and counting . . .

[UPDATE (1:22 AM): Seventeen pages. Down from 6551 words to 5614. Oy.]

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What can I say? Today has been a memo day. I spent most of the afternoon sipping tapioca tea and cranking out page after page of rough draft. I thought I’d get to the end today, but eventually I had to go home and attend to my puppy, and there went all my motivation. Working at home is hard.

Twelve pages so far for a ten-page memo, and I still have a whole issue (of two, but it’s the simpler one) to discuss. Oh boy, editing!

Halfway through NaBloPoMo, woo-ee. Not much to share today—I’ve been hanging out with my boyfriend and my dog in College Station, hacking away at that memo. It’s coming along, slowly and frustratingly. So many cases, argh!

The hardest part is figuring out how to organize it all. The ungraded practice memo we did earlier in the semester was much more straightforward. These are the three elements of the rule. The first element has four factors. And so on. All you had to do was plug through the analysis, and when you were done, a memo had magically appeared in your word processor.

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Did California seriously just vote yes on Prop. 8? Seriously? I thought you were better than that, Cali.

Yesterday at lunch I learned how to dress for the gauntlet of interviews I’ll run in January. Women MUST wear skirt suits—apparently that’s rule in appellate court or something, so it’s the rule in interviews. All the women’s suits in the mini fashion show were black, but I didn’t think until later to ask if they absolutely had to be. I don’t think black (or white) suits my coloring much, but maybe that’s a sacrifice I’ll have to make.

Shirts have to be white, or at least a conservative solid color. We must wear skin-toned pantyhose and closed-toed shoes. No slingbacks. No flashy jewelry or makeup. Hair neatly pulled back. Clear nail polish.

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I’d been mostly loafing around feeling lame and unmotivated since about the time I came back from Tupelo. I would leave school as soon as my last class ended with vague ideas of the work I’d get done once I was all comfy at home, then spend the afternoon and evening listening to things on the internet and playing solitaire.

Until today, that is, when I stumbled upon an unexpected font of motivation. Whence it came I haven’t a clue. All I know is that I was at school until six, checking things off my to-do list until I felt guilty enough about leaving my puppy home alone in the dark that I finally packed up and left. Today I cleared my email inbox (containing fifteen stale messages that had been creating vague feelings of obligation), did another chunk of research for my final memo, and tracked down a few key phone numbers. Heck, I even paid full attention in Torts today, no internet or anything. That hasn’t happened in a month.

I tend to look for clues outside myself as to why I go in and out of these slumps, but I’m starting to suspect that there aren’t any. I’m not eating differently, exercising more or less, happy or sad for any extrinsic reason, consciously willing myself to work harder, or even thinking different kinds of thoughts. And yet I feel motivated today, when yesterday I didn’t. Maybe it’s just one of those things.

NaBlo has only just begun, and already I’m racing the clock to midnight. Typical.

Today’s been a slow one. I took a two-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon, mostly in avoidance of working on my final memo. I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but my entire Legal Research & Writing grade will be determined by a memo assigned a week and half ago and due near the end of November.

I’m still in the research stage, and I’m finding it a wee bit frustrating. Legal research is . . . different. There are two major databases to search in, plus all the books in the library. As many cases as I gather, I’m not sure I’ll ever feel as though I’ve found everything. What if there’s another case out there that’s even *more* similar to mine or brings up a whole new line of reasoning? Or, worse, what if one of the cases that I discarded after skimming its blurb in the list of 400 search results turned out to have a golden sentence that could win my whole case buried deep inside it?

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So I’ve been in law school for a week, and I bet you’re ready to hear all about it, right? Ha!

So far I’ve been a strict compartmentalizer. There is school, which happens in and around the law building from 8:30 to 6:00 four days a week (and 9:30 to noon on Fridays), there is not-school, which happens at other places during other times, and never the twain shall meet. The only not-school things I do during the school day are occasionally check email and answer important calls, and when I go home, I leave all my books in my carrel.

It’s then something of an open question which category blogging about law school falls into. Okay, so maybe it’s pretty obvious that telling the internet *about* school doesn’t help me *do* school one bit, but maybe I’m looking for an excuse not to recount my first week in detail tonight, mkay?

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