New Kid on the Hallway

Yeah, so I'm kind of overextended right now

I came home yesterday about 4:30 (after being at my externship, in class, or in meetings all day), determined that I was going to work like a fiend all evening. I was going to read for 2 of my 3 classes today, and THEN I would research my moot court brief! Really, I would!

Okay, I would read for 2 classes so I could get a lot of work done on my brief today!!

Well, I would read for one class and go to bed early so I could get up early and get tons done today, TONS!!

In the end? I read for one class (checking Facebook after every page) and got to bed no earlier than I ever do, and got up no earlier either (though admittedly, it was a decent night's sleep, which I appreciate).

(And what is with my prof adding a 40 pp. opinion and a 37 pp law review article on top of our casebook assignment???)

At the moment I am a crappy wife, a crappy friend, and a not-especially-great student. Which is my own fault for choosing to do all the stuff I'm (supposed to be) doing, but it's funny how the "I can't say no to anything!" feeling of being on the tenure-track translates quite easily to the "what do I have to do to get a job???" context of law school.

Anyway, I am going to be a sucky blogger for a while (or, depending on your perspective, a suckier blogger). Maybe I can surface a bit around the end of October.

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(Also, thank you, everyone who commented on my metablogging post below! I really wasn't posting to try to get people to tell me this blog isn't self-absorbed, because yeah, it is kind of self-absorbed. But you were all very kind to comment thusly anyway. :-D)

Some days it seems like the only good use of the internet is for posting cat pictures

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

(In honor of my own dear departed Basement Cat.)

I also recently enjoyed this one, originally seen on someone's Facebook:

And, of course, there is always the genius that is Maru.

Now back to whether it violates the Constitution to award someone $1 million in compensatory damages and $145 million in punitive damages.

Let's navel gaze metablog, shall we?

I've been struggling somewhat with the purpose and function of this blog for a while now. I recently came across a description of it as "self-absorbed," and while part of me wants to be outraged (what! how dare you imply my every thought isn't a precious jewel offered up for the greater good of humanity!!), I also have to admit that, yeah - this blog is pretty self-absorbed.

Because, you know, it's a blog. About me. And my life.

It got me thinking, though, and I do think this blog was less self-absorbed when I wrote from the position of a professor (although it's also possible that my self-absorption was just more interesting to my usual audience, since I was talking about the kinds of things they all encountered in their own academic lives as well). I would not be at all surprised--or offended--if some of you who started reading this blog when I was a professor find it less interesting now that I'm a student again, since I think most of my original audience were either academics or people interested in academia for whatever reason. 

I'll be honest, I think this blog was better when I was a professor, because by the time I'd started, I'd been in academia for thirteen years (counting all my time as a grad student). I wasn't an authority by any standard, but I had enough experience to offer commentary on the profession--commentary that wasn't all about me, myself, and my own experiences--and in which I could respond to some of the themes and issues that profession was facing.

It is very hard to maintain the kind of analytic distance that allows you to offer that kind of commentary when you become immersed in an entirely new endeavor, one that also places you in a the explicitly subject position of student. (I've talked about this before.) First, I don't feel like know enough about the law as a profession to offer any kind of informed commentary. Second, everything is new! and overwhelming! and coming at me a million miles a minute! (not quite as bewildering as last year, but still lots of new stuff, and just lots of stuff to deal with, period.) It's hard to maintain analytic distance when you're frantically treading water till the next wave comes your way--to totally shift metaphors, it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff when you're buried under the harvest (I am abandoning this metaphor now). This blog becomes a way just to process what's going on, even though it's nothing remotely different from what every other law student experiences, nor is what I have to say about it remotely original.

It's funny, because I read some of my old posts--often posts I've forgotten I even wrote--and think they were actually pretty good. This blog never was a work of academic scholarship, but it was about academia as much as it was about me. Now, I think it's more about me than it is about the law, or even legal academia. 

And I suspect many of you will say, "So what?? It's your blog! You write about what you want to write about!" Which, if you do, I completely appreciate. It's just been an interesting shift - I have met, through blogging, a whole community of wonderful people who are now my friends regardless of what we do for a living. But it changes this blog for me to talk to "friends" instead of to "fellow academics," and I miss the kinds of conversations that used to take place here, rather than just providing updates on my life.

Which is not to say that I have any magical plan for how to change what I'm doing. And you know, maybe it really isn't all about me, and my blog has changed because blogging has changed. (I'm thinking especially of what Laura wrote here, which I wanted to respond to at the time, but never got around to.) But these thoughts have been tumbling around my head for quite a while, so I thought I would finally let them out, and see what they look like in the light of day.

Even though this entire post simply proves the whole self-absorbed thing.

In which I ignore politics, memorials, and arguments around the blogosphere to give you a boring update on my crazy week

Which, of course, turned out not to be THAT crazy once it got underway. Got the topic proposal in; survived the externship. I always forget that actually working somewhere is not usually as exhausting and stressful as interviewing to get there in the first place!

The externship class was...painful, and then in the class I was on-call for, I didn't actually get called on. Which is actually a bit annoying, since I did take extra care in preparing, and now I don't get any brownie points for good participation (assuming it would have been good, of course!), and it's not a class in which I usually have any burning insights to share, so... eh.

Actually, the whole class participation thing is interesting - it amuses me to realize that while I think of myself as a talker (which I'm sure my classmates loooooooooooove), in truth I'm selective. This semester, it seems, I have two classes in which I participate a lot, two in which I'm currently kind of quiet but I sense participation potential, and then one where, sorry, nothing to say! Mostly this is about size - I talk more in the smaller classes (can we have a duh? to that one), but some of it has to do with the subject and who's in the class.

In my smallest class - a seminar of eight people - I talk up a storm, but then, we all kind of have to because, well, eight people in a room for two hours! But also the topic's really interesting and we got to spend a lot of time last class complaining about Scalia. (For instance, when he concluded his dissent in U.S. v. Virginia with a paen to "The Code of the Gentleman," a guide to "manly honor" [Scalia's words, not mine!] that includes things like "A gentleman does not call to a woman out of a club window" and such, to which the only possible response is, Dude - really???)

It's also sort of funny that I even think about this since common wisdom is that class participation doesn't matter in law school. That's not strictly true this semester, in that two of my classes weight participation 20%, and the other three all allow for raising your grade if your participation is particularly good. A more accurate axiom would probably be to keep your eyes on the prize: participating in class is perfectly great as long preparing for class doesn't interfere in any way with studying for the final (since the final is what makes up the other 80% of your grade). (You wouldn't think being prepared for class and being prepared for the final could interfere with each other, but there are many out there who feel differently.)

Anyway. The other excitement of the week is that I've signed up for my school's moot court competition. Which I think officially pushes me over the edge of sanity into what-am-I-THINKING-doing-ALL-THIS?? territory, but I couldn't resist - I want more oral argument experience. And a woman I like was looking for a partner. It'll be over by the end of October, so I guess I can survive without sleep till then, right?

This week is going to be fun

Because despite only being four days long (and honestly, for me, three, because I don't have class on Friday), there are a ZILLION things I have to do this week:

• write a topic proposal for my law review casenote/comment. The weirdest thing about this is the feeling that we're supposed to pick a topic before we know anything about...anything. We found out that the topic proposal is due this week in the third week of August; last year we took only doctrinal courses (the basic building blocks that everyone takes) and by now we've had two whole weeks of class in the topics we finally got to choose. After spending a lot of time in a career where you might take literally years to figure out a topic (unless it was just me who took that long?), I find the whole thing kind of incomprehensible (although I know exactly why they're making us turn something in and completely agree with the logic). I mean, whatever I end up writing will be fine (or no worse than what anyone else does), but I have dangerously elevated standards of how much you should know about a topic before you attempt to write something publishable in it, and what I do know (or what I can learn in a semester) isn't anywhere near what I think I should know.
    
  Clearly, I will have to get over this.
    
  (I ended up talking to a couple of my professors and asking them what they thought would be good topics. Traditionally, I suck terribly when given a topic - if I don't formulate it myself, I can't work out what to do with it - but I really like one of the suggestions, which seems nicely manageable in scope and actually involves some material I was thinking about already.)
      
  (The other dilemma the casenote presents: do I try to do something that combines my previous knowledge with my new career? Both the profs I talked to asked me about this. On the one hand, it would make sense to build on my strengths; but on the other hand, I'm inclined to dive into something purely legal, and modern, both to show that I can, and because if I'm going to change careers, I kinda need to leave all the previous stuff behind. I like to cut ties. Kinda like how I'm not friends with any of my old boyfriends - I know people who are, and that's cool, but it's not how I roll. Besides, I think that writing on something medieval would just make me look weird, and writing on a legal history topic that's not medieval would require more research and more work than just doing the traditional casenote, because I'd be all convinced I'd have to go do archival research and learn the entire scholarly literature and basically try to write a dissertation.)
    
  In any case, whatever I do, I'm supposed to have a plan for it by the end of the day on Wednesday. At the moment? I have nothing.
     
  
• go to the first real day of my externship. Which meets MW mornings, but last W I had a conflict (scheduled before I got the externship arranged), and then today is a holiday (and actually my supervisor was working today, but I decided that I was not going to work on Labor Day. I will be uberdedicated and focused and all that from now on, but this is my only holiday until Thanksgiving!). Of course, on Wednesdays I go to my externship, eat lunch in my car while driving up to campus, then sit in class from 1-2:20 and 2:30-4:20. Which is, you know, fine - my choice and all that - but it means that I won't have much (any?) time during the day Wednesday to write an insightful topic proposal, let alone do my reading for the three classes I have on Thursday (thankfully I spent the weekend finishing the reading for two of those classes). Honestly, I don't think the proposal is all that formal - I think they want a paragraph. But still.
       
• attend the first of my externship class meetings. This is so I can get credit for the externship. There are only 4 class meetings total, so it's not like it's a huge burden, but because I didn't sign up for externship credit till last week I didn't know the class schedule till then. And I have to write up an assignment for the first two classes. This is due the day after the proposal. Hooray for P/F grading!
  
• be on-call for one class. On Thursday. This is the class I haven't read for yet. Being on-call really isn't a big deal - it requires doing the reading, which I would do anyway - but you know, when you know you're going to be called on you tend to read a little more carefully than you might otherwise. I will probably have time to do this before class on Thursday, but I will have less time since the externship class meeting cuts into it. (And tomorrow I have three classes and will have to finish reading for my Wednesday classes.)

Okay, it's not a zillion things, it's four. So I exaggerate. All will be fine, it just feels like I will have to take advantage of every minute of every day between now and Friday to get it all done, and I will, but then I will be unlikely to make it out of my pyjamas on Friday much before noon. I should just plan for that now.

What good and/or bad and/or taxing things do you have lined up for your short week? (And is it just me, or do short weeks almost always turn out more exhausting than the regular kind??)