New Kid on the Hallway

Observations from my week

• Driving to work one morning, I encountered a cyclist riding in the very middle of the lane, just like a car. (I nearly wrote "ran into a cyclist" but realized that might give the wrong impression...) I know bikes are vehicles and it pisses me off when people bike on the sidewalk, but the very middle of the lane? Really? Seemed kind of ballsy to me.
      
• Totally different kind of encounter: three foxes, hanging out in the nice neighborhood where I walk/run, on the edge of a park. I'm bopping along (relatively speaking), I look down the block, and see what I first think is a dog, and then realize is a fox. I slow down, so as not to frighten it, and see something in the corner of my eye - which turned out to be TWO foxes, right across the not-especially-wide street from me. They were hanging out in mouth of the storm drain, and I've seen foxes in (roughly) that neighborhood doing the same thing before, so I think they must use the sewers/drains as shelter and highways. Which is kind of gross, if you think about it, but they were such beautiful creatures, at once elegant and wild, with their long, dainty legs and high-set, sloping tails. They simply watched me go by, alert but not frightened. I'm sure they find a lot to eat in the neighborhood, but I hate that they're so comfortable around people, because in the end, if there ends up a conflict between the foxes and the people, the people are always going to win.
      
• I got to freak out one of my fellow summer associates this week by telling hir when I graduated from college. Zie was convinced I was about hir age, when I'm 11 years older. Zie was very complimentary in hir flabbergastedness and kept saying zie couldn't believe it. I told hir that if zie ever needed to cheer me up zie could tell me that again.
      
• Work seems to be going well. 
      
• My grades are finally all in, and, after a brief access crisis (wherein the law school said that the grades were in, but the central university system cocked up and wouldn't let anyone access them for about 12 hours), I even mustered the courage to look at them. They were fine. One was annoyingly low, but the others were good, including the class that had terrified me the most because I'd had NO idea whether I was getting any of it or not. (It was one of those classes where a lot of the rest of the class had taken related classes previously and I hadn't, and I was studying with a crowd of those people, so it was really hard to tell if I was getting anything or not. On the other hand, it also had a bunch of 3Ls in it, who, right before the exam, were all complaining about how hard it was to concentrate on exams by that point, until one of them laughed and said, "The 2Ls must be really psyched to hear this right now!" So maybe it helped not to be a 3L!) Anyway, the most important thing was that my GPA didn't go down (in practice it didn't go up - .01 isn't really a difference worth noting - but at least it didn't go down). Still waiting to find out where this puts me in terms of class rank, though.
      
• (And yes, I hate that I care so much about grades. I know they don't matter. And yet, I still care.)

Since I last wrote...

Sorry for not writing more frequently. Am really not sure where to go with this blog, whether I should continue, or if so, what should be its focus. But while I ponder that, here's what I've been up to:

I finished the semester (which I know I told you all already, but I have to repeat it, since it's such a lovely feeling). And I haven't spent TOO much time refreshing the site that tells us whether our grades are in. (Two grades are in, one more has been submitted by the prof but isn't released yet, and the fourth is nowhere to be seen, although that's still the case for lots of classes. I won't look until they're all in, of course.)

I submitted my law review note to be considered for publication. I don't think it's going to get chosen, because I think it's still underdeveloped, but hey, worth a shot.

And I started my summer job. It's a little surreal working for a firm, because I'd never envisioned myself working for a firm (and yet somehow applied for firm jobs and accepted one. Sometimes what I want to do and what I think I should do don't quite match). And part of me is convinced that I am somehow not suited for working at a firm. The rest of me thinks that this is a holdover from my academic past, the assumption that academia and the for-profit world are diametrically opposed, and if you succeed at one, you're doomed in the other. And that this is a ridiculous assumption.

So, so far, so good - the people are lovely and I haven't had problems yet figuring out how to do what I'm supposed to be doing. Obviously after a week I can't really comment on my success or failure or whatever yet. But the work is interesting and the atmosphere is great. 

The most amazing thing for me, though it makes me feel like a wide-eyed goober to comment on this, is the FREE FOOD EVERYWHERE. The firm caters lunch for its employees every day, and has kitchens on each floor better stocked than my kitchen is on most days. There's a coffeemaker that dispenses hot water, and a water machine that dispenses ice, and lots and lots of teas, so I can make iced tea to my heart's content. They even stock my preferred hippie granola non-sugar sweetener!

(Mind you, I have grandiose plans for this to be my summer of fitness and health, and lunches of four-cheese lasagna and bowls of Hershey's fun sized every 10 feet bode very poorly for my success. But still. I can't even tell you how nice it is not to have to worry about bringing lunch.)

So far, the biggest thing work has taught me: there is nothing - NOTHING - quite like the feeling of leaving work on a beautiful Friday afternoon, and knowing you are GENUINELY leaving that work behind you until Monday.* Turning in all your grades at the end of the semester comes close. But for me, at least, finishing the semester meant that now I could finally turn to all the other, non-teaching work I'd been putting off till grading was done. Working 9-5 means you have to be in one place from 9-5, but when you're done for the day, you're DONE.

*I know that once I actually finish, and (god willing) get a job, this may happen much less frequently. I either won't leave in the afternoon, or I'll be coming back in over the weekend anyway. Or I may work from home. But for now, it's pretty damn nice. 

Chronology v. status

My exams and papers being over (w00t!), I engaged in a little retail therapy the other day. (All hail outlet malls: 4 sweaters and a tank top for about $82! hooray! now if only I could find shoes...) And it got me thinking: I am in this weird social space where my chronological age doesn't match my status in my profession. I should not be dressing like a partner, but many women my age who went straight into law are now partners. I also shouldn't dress like I think I'm 25, but I share the same status as the 25-year-olds.

It's probably not all that big a deal for my summer gig, since the firm I'm working for is decidedly business casual (male partner my age was wearing a polo shirt and khakis during my interview). But it's still kind of a conundrum.

(This post partly inspired by this post, which I thought was kind of interesting.)

Not with a bang but with a whimper; or, I have become the student I hated

I just (just! as in, about 7 minutes ago! technically 19 minutes late! agh!) turned in a paper that is SUCH a piece of crap. Crappity crap crap crap. 

Thing is, it had the potentially to be pretty decent - not, maybe, earth-shattering in scope, but a nice little exegesis of this one legal issue. It was a discrete topic, on a sort of timely question, dealing with a very manageable set of sources. It coulda been a contender!

But I ran out of time.

So instead, it's one of those papers I'm sure many of you, my academic peeps, are familiar with: a good student (because yes, I am a good student; of course, most people in law school are good students) with a potentially good idea, and the ability to pull it off - who just doesn't. Because she runs out of time.

I can tell you right now at least seventeen things wrong with this paper: 

• there are a bunch of sections with NO TRANSITIONS BETWEEN THEM whatsoever. I just stopped writing one thing and started writing another.
• I also totally did that thing a wise blogger (which one, I can't remember) described recently, where you had all these notes to yourself of further things to look up and cite properly and add examples and so on, and you just cut them all because you didn't have time.
• The prof made a bunch of very good suggestions and I wasn't able to address all (okay, many) of them (and one I "addressed" with one of those "subject X is beyond the scope of this essay" lines. Such BS!).
• I don't think what I say in the introduction really matches what I end up doing in the body of the paper.
• There isn't really a conclusion. Well, unless you count bringing up an entirely new point and saying, "and THIS is why [X] will never work." So yeah, no conclusion.
• Oh, and the title sucks. It's a really great title for the paper I originally thought I was writing. But I don't think it works for the version I turned in AT ALL. 

 AUGH. AUGH. AUGH. 

I mean, these are such rookie mistakes! I know exactly where and what they are. I just didn't allow myself enough time not to make them. I could kick myself. I do - I DO kick myself.

But you know, being a student kind of sucks. Because there's something structural about being a student, even at this level, even for me, who knows better about what I need to do to be a good student and write a successful paper, that makes you do things at the last minute and do only what you need to do to fulfill requirements. 

I mean, there are definitely people in my class who were more on the ball with this paper than I was, who I'm sure turned in papers with things like TRANSITIONS and CONCLUSIONS and what have you. And yes, I tend toward the last-minute and lazy. I own my inadequacies, yo.

But still. Being a student feels qualitatively different from what it was like to be a prof, and to write my OWN papers for my OWN research agenda, that I controlled. 

Yes, I picked this course, and I picked the paper topic, blah blah blah. But in the end, I'm doing everything I do in law school because I HAVE to. There is a structure in place, a machine, and I am just the product grinding through the cogs. (Whoa, random Mario Savio reference there.) As a prof, I decided whether I was going to go to this conference, or that conference, or what and when I would write and submit and so on. Sure, I needed to write and apply for stuff to succeed in my profession, but I controlled a lot more of how and when I did it than I do as a student.

(I'm also laughing at myself right now because I sound way too much like two people from my past: the student who wrote on a fellow TA's evaluation that there shouldn't be reading assignments, the student should just be able to read when s/he felt like it; and a grad school colleague who used to bemoan the tyranny of deadlines, and to say that she could do really excellent work if she could do it on her own schedule, rather than on the arbitrary semester-based schedule of the professors/grad program. To which sentiment the rest of my grad cohort and I weren't very sympathetic, because, duh! you signed up for grad school! what did you think it would be like?

And I signed up for law school! What did I think it would be like? I mean, you'd think I'd have known, right?)

It's just really weird feeling yourself boxed in by this structure to which you must conform, these school requirements, and feeling yourself react in ways that you know, intellectually, may not be the most productive. I have way more sympathy for all the ghosts of my past students than I did when I was teaching - I KNOW why profs do what they do, and why they require students to do all this kind of crap, and even so, I find myself resentful, and petulant, and cutting corners, and doing the minimum required to get the results I want. I find myself thinking in terms of "us" (students) and "them" (everyone else).

Being a student just MAKES you this way. It just does.

But the upside to my paper angst: my semester is now officially OVER!!!! (If you'll pardon me, I have a long-overdue date with some Thai food and my DVR...)

That Amazon meme

As seen...everywhere.

My first Amazon purchase (that I can find a record of, anyway) was R.R. Davies's The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063-1415. I remember I read Ellis Peters's trilogy of historical novels about the conquest of Wales under John and Edward I, and I wanted to read more on the history. (As a historian of England, I knew squat about Wales. I once had a student ask me why Scotland has its own money while Wales doesn't, and my immediate response was, "Scotland has its own money?" So, British history: not my strength.)

Never did read the book, though. And it's long gone by now.

(Actually, looking through my old orders is amusing; you can definitely trace my career track through my purchases!)

Exams done, but the semester continues

Last exam today. It was fine - though after talking about it with friends after (which is not quite the same as being forced to listen to strangers dissect the exam in your presence, but probably also to be avoided for peace of mind), I don't think I came up with anything that anyone else didn't, and I know there are a couple of things others addressed that I didn't (the annoying bit: I THOUGHT of them during the exam, but forgot to go back and include them before time ran out. Outstanding!). 

But still, no point in worrying now.*

Because now I have to write probably 10 more pages for a seminar paper. Whee!!

Current nails: fuschia/magenta, topped with fuschia, purple, and blue glitter on the ring fingers.

*I will be so happy to finish law school, because I hate worrying about grades. I'm not a big enough person NOT to worry about grades while receiving them; they matter to me. If you give me something to compare myself against, I'll agonize about it. I can't wait to get out of the context where such rankings matter.