New Kid on the Hallway

You know you're older than your classmates when...

...in class, you watch a documentary about events in 1973 and
- you were alive in 1973,
- you can remember the fashions from 1973,
- the only other person in the room you can say that about for sure is the professor, and
- one of your classmates, who's seen the film before, announces that you've never SEEN as many people smoke inside before as you will in this movie. (Um, actually? I have.)

Off to soak my dentures and drink some Metamucil...

Job stuff

Before I went to bed last night, I thought, "Gosh, it would be nice to have a fun, cool, exciting dream tonight."

And what did I dream?

That I had a clerkship interview somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania and that I was running through this random town in the pouring rain, twenty minutes late.

So much for fun and excitement.

It's kind of ironic, actually, because my clerkship application process ended a while ago: I'm going to clerk for a state appellate court next year. I lined this up before federal clerkships even opened up this year, so have no idea how I would have done on the federal market, but am actually really glad - first, I don't have to move, and second, the federal clerkship market seems to have gone completely to hell these days. I've seen a number of folks around the web suggesting that judges are more and more inclined to hire people who already have legal experience - partly as a way to get around the hiring plan, probably partly because the implosion of big law led to a lot of highly-credentialed people getting laid off and threw off a lot of the traditional application patterns. 

Whatever the case, I only know of two people from my school who landed federal clerkships (not on the hiring plan), and I know of many really really REALLY highly-ranked students who didn't get any calls at all. Maybe that's not all that out of line, given the school I attend; I'm not sure. I just know that the vibe around campus is that people who should have got at least a couple of interviews got nothing. 

So, yeah, I'm relieved to be done with applications for the year. Definitely.

Anyway, this gig came up earlier than I'd expected, and I'd already asked my letter-writers for a whole swack of letters to send hither and yon to federal judges across the country. So by the time I got the job, I had literally stacks of letters of recommendation ready for me, and I shoved them in a cubby with the rest of my clerkship application stuff and forgot about them. Cleaning up clutter this afternoon, I decided I could throw all that stuff out.

So I threw out letters of recommendation from all three letter writers. It's funny, because part of me wanted to open them and see what the authors had written. But the bigger part of me really DIDN'T want to. 

Because I didn't want to be disappointed in what they'd said about me. 

Thing is, I have no reason to think they wrote anything bad about me (I'm sure they wouldn't have agreed to write for me if they didn't have anything good to say). I just like thinking they said AMAZING things about me, and don't want that illusion shattered.

Ah, ego...

Here's a question...

Okay, people, this is something (totally unmomentous) that I've been thinking about for a while: what do you like to eat for breakfast?

I am a breakfast person - I always have been. I wake up STARVING, and am useless until I've had something to eat. I'm usually too tired/busy in the morning to cook up a full breakfast (especially since the full egg-and-bacon deal, while not evil in itself, is probably not something to eat every single day). So I usually eat cereal. 

The thing is, unless I eat a HUGE amount of cereal, I'm hungry again three hours later. I don't really object to eating tremendous amounts of cereal, but it seems to rack up more calories than I want to expend, for what I'm getting. 

So, my question is: do any of you have great ideas for a breakfast that's easy to prepare, satisfying in that it keeps you going till lunch, without being a million calories? (I'm not looking for "lite" diet food, just to keep the whole meal around 500-600 calories.) Or am I better off eating a little breakfast and having a snack between breakfast and lunch?

Overreacting

I have been feeling kind of sorry for myself all day. But that's kind of an overreaction. Really, it's just because this cold is still wearing me down - there's nothing wrong with my life, all is good, I'm just crazy busy and all.

Thing is, though, my head is all plugged up, so I sound wrong to myself when I talk, and for some reason, that was really disconcerting today. It just feels wrong, and I keep being amazed that people aren't commenting on my fundamental wrongness and differentness. 

(But I'm probably overreacting.)

And today was also one of those days when I feel like a human-sized labrador puppy. Hi! How are you! You're cool! Wanna play with me? Please please please please please?? I'll catch the ball! You can throw it, I'll bring it back! I promise!

Is it just me? Do any of the rest of you have days like this, when you feel like you keep blundering into people (figuratively, not literally), trying to be part of things yet always feeling peripheral? And if you do, do you think they have anything to do with actually being a big PITA blundering into things, or are they just paranoia in your head? 

(I may be overreacting.)

And then I was annoyed at a classmate for being anti-intellectual. Which isn't really fair - this is lawyer college, not a Ph.D. program, and people come here to learn how to be a lawyer, not to ponder weighty academic debates. But still, it was one of the very few times since starting law school that I've felt like someone was really disdaining...well, the kinds of things I spent sixteen years of my life doing. It's one thing for someone to say, "This just isn't my cup of tea." It's another to imply, "Who the hell would ever study this stuff, anyway??"

(But I'm probably overreacting.)

Lastly, there appears to be a weird dynamic developing with one of my friends wherein we only talk about jobs. The thing about jobs is, if you're a law student, you can carry on a conversation with pretty much any other law student, no matter who they are, if you're talking about jobs. But talking about jobs is also a minefield. And this feels like it's turning into a weird thing where this person is comparing their job success/opportunities against mine. I don't think I've been more successful, job-wise, but I sometimes feel like this person thinks I have been, and it's not that they think I don't deserve my success (to the extent I've had any), but that this person feels they should have had more success. I can't pinpoint what makes me feel this way (I'm very bad at identifying passive-aggressive behavior when directed toward me--I just kind of ignore stuff unless you talk to me directly--so I'm not much good at analyzing this), it's just a kind of vibe.

(But this, too, may be an overreaction.)

Really, though, this would have been a much better day if I could have just crawled back under the covers and gone back to bed, and skipped everything else.

Not dead yet

So, here you all go, writing me such fascinating and thoughtful comments on my last post. They were (are) great. I really wanted to take the time to respond to them properly - to write a second post, in fact, in response, because the comments deserved that. 

And instead I dropped off the face of the blogosphere.

Unfortunately, this is not that post, either; I ran out of an allergy medication this weekend (don't you always run out of prescriptions at the beginning of a long weekend, when your pharmacy is only open M-F? I always do, anyway!), and thought my allergies were just killing me. Then I got the medicine today and figured out that, no, in fact, my allergies aren't THAT bad--I have an actual COLD. 

One of those obnoxious summer colds where my nose is running like a tap and my throat is sore from post-nasal drip and from sleeping with my mouth open because I can't breathe through my nose. (It's really dry here, which is what gets the throat going.) And my head is full of gunk and I feel kind of hot and achy. And I basically can't come up with any good response to your wonderful comments because any mental energy I have has to go to figuring out Evidence and Labor Law and co-organizing our annual Moot Court competition. Or watching the U.S. Open. You know, priorities. 

But I promise I'll get back to it. At some point. Maybe this weekend?

In the meantime, hope everyone's Labor Day was wonderful (if you're in the U.S.). Now it's a countdown to Thanksgiving!