Stasis

Predictably enough, after five days of vacation-stasis I'm bored out of my mind. The lack of activity makes me anxious because I feel like I should be doing something, and I'm not. I already restored my habitat: cleaned my apartment, took out the recycling, watered my poor plants, caught up with neglected friends. What do I do with myself?

I decided to write a paper. In the hopes of getting it published. I figure this will be the last moment for a while that I'll have the time to write something academic. And all the attorney bios I've read list (at least one) published work!

Next week I'm vacationing to Maui; if I'm gonna write this paper I'll be challenging (again) the age-old rule that You Can't Get Any Work Done on the Beach.

Cheating

I confess I've been cheating on this blog with another blog!

I co-launched a new blog with a friend of mine. It's about the nuances of social interactions online. For example, I (as "Sansserif") posted on the differences between "LOL" and "haha!" during an IM conversation. My co-blogger ("Youareyou") has written on such topics as the irrationality of a new Facebook group called Six Degrees of Separation.

Here it is if you'd like to check it out: Webbed Footprint.

CC Birthday

A few photos of Larry Lessig from the CC birthday last night:

 
 
 

Yes, he did show up in person!

Happy Birthday Creative Commons

I'm off tonight to celebrate the 5th birthday of Creative Commons, Larry Lessig's brainchild that offers an alternative method of copyrighting creative works. Instead of "all rights reserved," it provides licenses requiring attribution, or non-commercial use, etc. (My blog is CC licensed, and Flickr lets you CC license your photos.)

Last year a friend and I were sorely disappointed when Larry appeared only as his avatar on Second Life. This year I'm hoping he'll actually show, since he's definitely in the area. I heard from a friend's girlfriend that his Contracts final at Stanford was so brutal he brought his students muffins.

Muffins aren't going to ease my disappointment if he doesn't make it again this year. Although I guess free alcohol might...

Double Check Mate

Another set of finals completed! I have no idea what I was thinking, setting myself up with four finals my 3L year. Actually I do know what I was thinking: I wanted to take more IP classes because I love IP and because I figured there wouldn't be much to learn. Next semester I got smart: I'll only have one final.

A final thought on multiple choice exams. There are some people who refuse to go over their answers because they're afraid they'll change an answer; they trust their first instinct. I always force myself to go over as many questions as I can (for this exam, consisting of 100 MCs, I had exactly enough time to review them all). This requires great will power, especially when it's your last exam of the semester and only about three people are still taking the exam by the end of the 2 and a half hours.

I almost always end up keeping the same answer on the questions I marked as 'questionable.' This last exam I changed a few other answers, however. One question followed several others about survival and wrongful death actions. It involved a 6 year old child whose mother had been in a coma for 2 months. What could the child collect for?
A. Lost support
B. Emotional distress
C. Mother's wages
D. Nothing.

The first time through I chose A, as in a wrongful death action. The second time around I realized: the mother wasn't dead, so the child couldn't collect anything.

Catching this one little trick made the entire agonizing review worthwhile.

The Night Shift

It's pretty well accepted that sleep is good for learning. (As previously discussed by me.)

Last night I had my first final in Sports Law. Every semester I have post exam stress disorder, most frequently in the form of dreams, as I've described here and here. I felt pretty excellent coming out of this final, and there was very little anxiety over it.

Nevertheless, last night I distinctly remember being in a quasi-sleeping/dreamlike state: I was rehearsing the names of cases from Sports Law and reviewing what they held. To me this represents direct evidence of my brain at work while I sleep! Amazing!

The best part is that I half-woke from this midnight review and, aware of what I was doing, promptly scolded myself: 'That final is over! No need to learn those cases, kid.'

Out of Line

What is up with some of these outlines? Granted, I'm pretty concise in my note taking - I'm no Transcriber. The most pages of notes I have this semester (not the most attentive semester of my law school career I admit) is 65 pages for Remedies. Some of my other classes have half that. That includes my dorky briefs for every case in the reading plus class notes.

Some of these kids have 70 page outlines! A friend said it best: can you really call that an outline?

My outlines have never been real favorites; my Remedies outline is only 19 pages. I've been accused of being "cryptic," but jeez, I try to keep my outlines within the boundaries of my attention span.

Ethical

The November MPRE (Multi-state Professional Responsibility Exam) scores were released today. Yes, I passed. Getting my score was a pretty intense experience though! My heart rate was up, hands shaking a bit. I can only imagine what it must feel like to check whether you passed the bar.

The experience was a bit confounding because the PDF lists your score...but not whether you passed. So you're all jacked up and Adobe opens up and the document pops up...and you're like, 'Wait, did I pass or what?' You're looking for big block letters, "PASSED," y'know?

Passing score in CA is 79. (Next year it will be 86.)

Penultimate Finals

Finals, nigh! I'm working hard and playing hard; balance is key. I've said it before and I'll say it again: reading period rocks. No class, the opportunity to narrow your focus onto one thing to the exclusion of everything else in your life...how often do we get the chance to do that? Clearly I'm a 3L, right? Already waxing nostalgic for this sweet academic life...

I would like to congratulate a very good (retired) blogger friend of mine LawyerLike on his recent bar passage! (Those crazy Canadians have a bizarrely rational system whereby they take a multiple choice test and then work for 9 months before being born again as lawyers. On the other hand, they have to call the judge "my lord.")

Good luck to everyone on finals!