A Summer at the Bar Shouldn't Be This Dry

I am only two weeks in to Bar Prep and am looking for the exit. I have no stamina. I don't know if I am just out of practice with the whole idea of studying every day (haven't done that since first year) or if my innate laziness is just more pronounced under these concentrated conditions. Regardless of the cause, this can very easily translate into a problem (of the large and hulking variety).

This is the sort of schedule advocated by the BarBri program:

8:00 - 9:00 am: Prepatory Reading
9:00 am - 12:30pm: BarBri Lectures
12:30 - 1:30: travel time / lunch
1:30 - 3:30: MBE Practice Questions
3:30 - 4:00: Break, fold laundry
4:00 - 6:00: Study Substantive law
6:00 - 7:00: Dinner
7:00 - 8:00pm: Study Substantive Law

Rinse and Repeat 6 days out of 7. (Seriously, we are supposed to schedule in allotted time to fold laundry and all those other household things)

That is not going to happen. First of all such a rigid schedule would, I believe, be counterproductive for me; my guilt complex is too refined. I am not going to waste energy angsting over what I am not doing when that (at present limited) energy can be invested in what I am. (That in a nutshell is my take-away lesson from first year of law school). Secondly, I think that I am constitutionally incapable of studying 8-10 hours a day over 6 weeks. That is just so...abysmally bleak. And, it is childish and undisciplined, but I don't perform particularly well when so amazingly un-inspired. It would be different, I expect if I knew why I was doing this - what I was doing afterwards, but that is another big unknown.

Let me illustrate my present performance under this little black rain-cloud:

Anna's Adjusted Study Schedule
7:15 am: Alarm goes off
7:23am: Alarm goes off again

Somewhen between 7:23 and 7:30 I had a dream which revealed the secret of life the universe and everthing and everthing is peacefull and wonderful and...

7:31 am: Alarm again, secret to enlightment lost in cacophony
7:40(ish): Out of bed and prepare for the day
NPR's Morning edition reminds me (but only just vaguely) that there is a world outside of Bar Prep and procrastination. It also reminds me that it's not always gumdrops and rainbows. Wish I had that secret to life the universe and everything.

[There is a black hole somewhere between 8:00 - 8:30 where time is distorted and despite being ready to leave at a reasonable hour, I am running late again...]

9:10am: Slide in ten minutes late to lecture class; today's topic: Suretyship and Liens
9:15 am: "A suretyship is created where a third party agrees to 'back up the debt' of another under circumstances which the initial debtor is still liable."
9:17 am: Lecturer looks like an old Michael Douglas (which makes him really old) but sounds like John Goodman.
9:20 - 9:40: I give suretyship interests some very serious attention and consideration.
9:45 am: I am proud of my attention to the topic, I reward myself with brief reflection on sex.
9:50 am: "A promise to serve as a surety must be supported by consideration except where surety signs a promissory note."
9:57 am: sex, sex, sex....


I won't continue, but you see where I am going with this? Distracted, undisciplined, and uninspired (or inspired by the wrong things at least; let me say when you find yourself attracted to the lecturer because he has the slightest resemblance to Stephen Colbert and a southern minister you are going too far).

In conclusion, balance is important in life. For my own health and productivity the the demanding schedule and reclusive expectations are going to have to wait until July at the earliest.

--Anna

Some thoughts on Sex and the City

This Friday I put on my party shoes, grabbed my faux-Prada purse and went to the movies for the opening of Sex and the City! (insert bouncy theme music here). Sex and the City, drinks with ‘the girls,’ and an unfettered passion for footwear have proved an important, unifying aspect of the typical 21st American girl’s life…as proved by the long line of other similarly heeled theatre-goers. Unfortunately, this 21st century girl has long since passed the stage where the adventures of the self-absorbed and uncompromising elite proved entertaining or revolutionary. (That all sounds well and good, but it really comes down to the fact that I really just don’t like Carrie) So, while all dressed up and ready to toast the movie with a cosmopolitan with my friends, I wasn’t expecting much from the movie itself. Sometimes I love it when I am wrong!


Thus far the movie has gotten a decidedly bad rap in the Life & Style section of the major newspapers and magazine. The New York Times called it “vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow…[and] overlong.” Under the byline “Girl’s Gone Mild” Newsweek described the many Manolo heels featured as the “sharpest thing” about the recent release. The New York Time’s review at least, is undeserved. The conclusion in all the Life and Style sections seems to be that the ‘Style is still ‘fabulous’ (with perhaps the exception of an odd avian headdress – a bit too ‘Bride of Frankenstein in Technicolor’) but the ‘Life’ supremely inconsequential and out of touch. As Manohla Dargis for the NYT observed: “It’s…awash with materialism and narcissism.” My question: where have you been the last 10 years? The show was outrageous, observant and revolutionary – but never particularly profound. Even the big dramas Carrie weathered throughout the six seasons always carried an element of triviality. Sex and the City’s contribution is that it asked the questions. It didn’t provide the answers but it was always honest. I respect this most recent production (and Michael Patrick King’s writing) because it retained this honesty.

Sex and the City defined a generation. Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha are this girl’s generation’s cultural gurus. While I waited in line, ticket in hand with dozens of other young women in heels and labels, my mind ran along the lines of a religious pilgrimage (the Wive’s Tale in the age of bikini waxing and texting). As if we were all here for answers on how to be young, fearless, and fabulous (seriously, if there is a handbook circulating on this topic, I would love to peruse it). In returning to the big screen, Sex and the City, comes with Big expectations. Michael Patrick King and the producers were clearly conscious of and sensitive to this expectation and responsibility, gently refuting it in the closing sequence: Carrie addresses an audience at her bookstore on her most recent book, reflecting on why women who have flouted “The Rules” in every other aspect of our personal and professional lives continue to cleave to them so tenaciously when it comes to love, sex and marriage, concluding that happiness comes down to the ‘you and me.’ It may not be the grand wedding closing of the usual Cinderella story but this is one of the most honest and hopeful happily ever afters I’ve ever encountered.


For a thoughtful review on SATC visit the LA Times here.

Some Thoughts on Bar Prep

It is bizarre that a little over a week after graduation I find myself not only back at the law school but back at the same lecture hall and the same subjects from my first year. Two weeks ago (especially after our conference and client meeting up in DC) I was glowing with accomplishment. Look how far I've come! Oh, the places I'll go! Turns out the first place I'll go is right back to the beginning... (insert wry smile here).

I don't have much to say on the topic of Bar Prep at this point as I have accomplished very little thus far. Classes started last Thursday. I can say that learning civil procedure the second time around is no less painful than it was nearly three years ago. Squeezing a semester's worth of lessons into two 3 hour segments is like trying to get a canteloup through something the size of a lemon; it just won't fit (can I get a summary judgment on that?). By the end of each tutorial my brain is soup and I am good for nothing which rather interferes with my self-study plans. It is also harder in that I am learning solely for information this time around and with no interest in edification. I consequently find it rather hard to motivate myself (especially when combined with aforementioned soup-brained-ness).

Oh well. I'll stop kivetching for today and finish up with Secured Transaction and hope that tomorrow is a better (more productive!) day!

BarBri

Hello, let me introduce myself, I am Anna Q., esquire. I am now a Juris Doctor.
So...after the toasts, the butter cream graduation cake...The question is what comes after – where do I go from here? I am not talking about the great hereafter family and friends keep referring to (ie: unemployment) but the more mundane and (at the moment) far more menacing – the Bar.

So, where do I go from here? The answer? Back where I started…namely First year review of Civil Procedure (and after that Torts, Crim Pro and an assortment of other classes I couldn’t bare to take while in law school). I have often felt life and law school are cyclical – at the same time I could do without returning to 12(b)6 Motion to Dismiss and Eerie.

Oh well,

Tomorrow I start formal Bar preparation with BarBri. I am less than enthused. Once more into the breech dear friends, once more!

This Post is for You, Tony...

I was all ready to write an entry with profound reflections on life, instead, you are going to get a rant on “Lifetime” (“Television for women”). Now, with the exception of the odd “Frasier” episode on a Friday morning I make a point of avoiding Lifetime like the plague. This past Saturday night was an exception, when, after admitting to self that I hadn’t done any real studying for almost an hour, I joined my roommates on the couch.

“What’s on?”

“Love Sick: Secrets of a Sex Addict”

“Oh! Goody!” Interest piqued poured myself a glass of wine and asked Elizabeth budge up on the couch.

My issues with this film are numerous. First, I will confess, I felt deceived. “Secrets of a Sex Addict”’ – how very titillating, how progressive! I was impressed: Lifetime you are joining the Oh! Channel century! This is no longer your grandmother’s station; this is more like Talk Sex with Sue Johanson. I was expecting something more along the lines of the brash and honest I-TV series “Confessions of a Call Girl” or Sex and the City but with soft lighting and bad shoes. Check on soft lighting, check on bad shoes and many chiseled jaws and fluffy hair, missing much on the honesty.


How to describe this film? Anyone who has flipped past the Lifetime channel should have no trouble imagining the set up. The men were so very bad, the women so very good (so very patiently victimized) and the dialogue just painful. At several points I had to stop myself from flinging my – empty – wine goblet at the screen (it may be necessary to be soused to watch a Lifetime movie but you run a risk of property damage). Described as the “true story of a married woman with a shameful secret” the movie is based on the memoir of Sue William Silvermen, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, which document’s the author’s 28 days in a rehab clinic for a sex, or love, addiction. Now, I say based on, but I am actually finding it rather difficult to summarize the plot of this movie as it is so far from accurately depicting the events and emotions recounted in Silvermen’s memoir (which I hastily read afterwards on Google books). Briefly, in the film Sue is presented as a woman unhappy in a stagnant marriage and career. In response to this dissatisfaction she begins a series of exclusive affairs; one with her architect, another with her firm’s client etc. From each of these interactions Sue believes she will find the love she craves. These interactions are hardly the sterile, frantic and frequently anonymous and “dangerous encounters” described in the memoir.
Consider for example, Sue’s opening sentences of her memoir:

“Every Thursday at noon I have sex with Rick in room #213 of the Rainbow Motel. Today, even though I promised my therapist I wouldn’t come here again, I pull into the lot and park beside Rick’s black Ford Bronco. I cut the engine and air conditioner and listen to stillness, to nothing, to heat.”

Instead, we have Lifetime’s soft lighting and music and soulful sex scenes belonging to a romance novel instead of a film on a destructive compulsion and rehabilitation. Much more “English Patient” than any other kind of patient. This 2 hour movie didn’t even dedicate 28 minutes to Sue’s time in the clinic. This distortion of the purpose and focus of the memoir is only the beginning of my complaints. In true lawyer-ly fashion let me itemize these:

(1) It minimized the author’s past trauma and the roots of her compulsive behavior. Sexually abused by her father as a young child (think age 5) and later as an adolescent, this history is only alluded to in brief flashbacks and in conclusory statements from her therapist. Accepting that sex addiction is an addiction (and that one is responsible for one’s own actions and decisions) is one thing; however, the film (ie the character and her psychiatrist) completely failed to address the root of the character’s compulsion or confront her past trauma.
(2) It romanticized her sexual interactions. My assumption is that this was done to make the character more palatable, safe, and likable to the perceived Lifetime audience.
(3) Finally….oh dash it. I have worked off all my ire for now. Long story short: down with Lifetime; check out Sue Silverman’s memoirs; and I am off to polish off some Ben and Jerry’s….

That Time of Year Again!

“April is the cruelest month, breeding….” fodder for my allergies. To further abuse literature and literary allusions: “It [is] the best of times, it [is] the worst of times.” It is gorgeous outside, but I can’t breathe; I am not sure how I feel about this trade-off. This recent allergy attack, coupled with the worst cold and flu season of the last five years and subsequently feeling like I’ve been sick for the last two months led me last week to conclude the worst…

We all have some secret (or not so secret) focused form of hypochondria; some illness out there that is somehow worse than all the others and we somehow, perversely, are so much more likely to contract. For my mother this fixation changes with whatever Newsweek article she has read most recently (our household has equipped itself for every passing epidemic from Mad Cow to Bird Flu). For others, this fixation is, well, fixed. For example, a friend of mine in college felt this way about herpes. Every few months there would be a panic attack precipitated by the fear that a pimple around her mouth indicated infection. A trip to student health would clear this up and bring things back to normal operation. However, I always found it funny how this very specific STD managed to inspire such terror, and a terror that was not shared over other potential diseases. More serious infections such as Hepatitis B, syphilis, Chlamydia etc. didn’t raise a thought, herpes simplex was simply all.

I teased my friend, but I am not much different. For me, this fear is mono. Every time I get a cold a part of me (that unreasonable voice in the back of my mind) attributes it to mono. And its not only the cold symptoms: “Gee, my shoulder really hurts, hope it isn’t mono” or “Gosh, I just can’t pay attention in class, I must have mono”. All this to say that when I woke up this past Thursday dizzy, fatigued and with a drippy nose I came to one diagnosis: mono. I just needed a doctor to corroborate.

So I made and appointment and in the interim attended classes and a conference and enjoyed the feeling of martyrdom as I reconciled myself to the idea of the dreaded disease.

Naturally, during this time I was getting quite accustomed to the prospect of enforced bed rest (ha! Forget the bar!), and enthusiastic that I would have such an excuse for my laziness over the last month, so imagine my disappointment when the Doctor came back with the diagnosis: allergies. So much less dramatic and I don’t think that I can use this as an excuse to the same effect.

Ah, Spring. Much can (and has) been said of the season: “Nothing is so beautiful as spring – When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush” (Gerard Manly Hopkins); when “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love” (Tennyson). This brings me to my next topic: “A little madness in the Spring / Is wholesome even for the King.” (Dickinson). Let me share with you my little madness and why I think it very wholesome.

Having gotten the clean bill of health I went out that night with two of my roommates, Kitty and Elizabeth.
Before I continue further, I would like to stop and advise my Uncle Tim, who I ill-advisedly (considering the direction of this blog) supplied the address to a month ago, to stop here. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. In the name of Thanksgiving, and sweet potato pie and all things holy and familial do not continue to read this entry. Jump to my rant on Eliot Spitzer and other people’s scandalousness…

………………………………………………………………………………………….


Okay, the rest of you, are you still with me? Are you seated comfortably? Good. After all that build up (I invoked Sweet Potato Pie for goodness sakes!) I am afraid that this is going to be a bit anti-climatic.

Anyways, I went out with Kitty and Elizabeth. Topo was full that night. Apparently our rival University was hosting an MBA rugby tournament that weekend. Now, I’ve been kicking myself since last year when up in NYC for my cousin’s graduation, I called an early night (we were going to the Met! I wanted to be rested!) and missed the opportunity to, how does one say, Mack (?) with visiting Irish rugby players with my cousins. Let’s just say that “The Cloisters” with my parents the next day was paltry consolation. Ah, but here, a second opportunity!

Long (or rather, not so long as it really should have been) story short, met an interesting fellow from Stanford. This ex-physicist/current MBA provided the opportunity to experiment with some basic principles of physics. For example, let’s look at Newton’s Laws of Motion, in translation:
1) Bodies in motion are gonna stay in motion.
2) “Acceleration of a body is proportional to, and in the same direction as, the force acting upon it.” (ie: you know where this is headed and you have to be prepared to exert your own force)
3) For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. – I think that speaks for itself.

Yes, simple, basic stuff. And I can see a number of you (most particularly you, Tessa) rolling your eyes at my geekiness in comparing hook-ups to Newton’s law of inertia etc, but I think it applies. It was a valuable experience – nothing like hands on experiments!

Spring indeed.
Never mind “The Waste Land,” Eliot, this Profrock is going to dare to eat a peach!

The End of an Era

I am writing you while sitting through the last class of my formal education. It is a little hard to process; I've always been a student, I don't know that I know how to do anything else (not that I have done this very well of late, as demonstrated by my lack of attention to class)! This is the end of an era. So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, adieu.

Let us have a moment of silence.....

Actually, it is definitely time that this era passed, given the lack of motivation I have had for my formal education over the last semester. I am rather proud that I even made it to this class, truth be told. I had to call friend and fellow classmate Mya en route to confirm that the fact that it is rainy and limited parking are NOT sufficient reasons to skip the last class of Trusts and Estates. Tempting , yes, understandable even, but not adequate.

So I am here in my back row seat, present only out of a vague sense of duty and nostalgia and googling pictures of ocean liners for this blog and manifestly NOT paying attention. The words "beneficiaries," "trustees," and "fiduciary duties" filter through from my professor's lecture every so often so I am assured that he at least is on topic and on track. He may be the only one. One of the benefits of a back row seat is you get to observe the monitors of all the students in front of you. Of the four rows ahead of me only one is open to notes (but she is a 2L so that really can't count). Even the conscientous Mya is less than engaged in the lecture; helping me in same search for blog images! (By the way, I should include here that Mya thoroughly approves the one selected. I am much gratified by this much coveted commendation).

All this to say that it is time that this chapter closed and this class ended.