Extracurricular Activities

I apologize in advance for the inevitably poor grammar and organization that is to follow in this post. Like a sapped solar panel, I have none left; I must recharge.

I have been spending 90% of my time lately on an "assignment." I put it in quotations because I usually define assignments as follows: 1) Assigned 2) Graded.

I haven't been called upon to think about assignments at all for some time, because they aren't really a thing in law school. In law school, professors prefer to grade one set of things, so they make that thing a final exam, and put all the things they ever taught you inside it.

This "assignment" is not graded. If it is completed, you pass. If it is incomplete, you fail. Because the "assignment" is a 30 or fewer page paper, with only a few other specifications, completion is not really an issue.

By 90% of my time, I mean all my time. Normally when I refer to "my time," I mean the hours in a week minus evenings with Sara and Joey, minus mornings eating breaking and drinking coffee, minus lunch breaks, minus barn visits.

But right now, I mean 90% of the hours in a day. And by day, I mean day plus night, or 24 hours. Which is roughly 22.5 hours. Or so. I'm bad at math and too tired to consult a calculator.

I'll cut the cryptic and admit: the paper is a brief, a moot court brief to be exact. And moot court is something I've been eagerly anticipating for some time.

Moot court is an exciting time in a 2L's life when she finds a smart partner, writes a big paper, and then makes arguments on that paper in the style of a Supreme Court hearing, with hopes to win scholarly fame and thousands of dollars in scholarships.

I WAS SO STUPID TO ANTICIPATE MOOT COURT.

Like most potentially rewarding tasks, moot court has taken over my life, preventing me from going to the barn more than twice in fourteen days, and infecting me with a 24-hour bout of insomnia that was truly terrifying.

This is how insomnia works: you are too tired to be productive or think clearly, and far too tired for physical comfort, but you can do nothing other than troll the dark house like a ghost and try to study only to realize you can't really read because apparently the parts of a brain that decipher symbols turn off without rest. Luckily it was a one-night-only experience.

Some combination of a stressful atmosphere, furious typing and massive amounts of data entry, organization and reorganization caused my Gateway PC to finally close its doors for business. It had been on its sickbed for some time, but in the heat of brief drafting, after I had gotten up to refill my coffee cup and sat back down to reopen the document, it innocently asked, What document?

Well, its exact words were, "Cannot retrieve mootctbrief.doc. The item no longer exists."

There was a moment where I considered throwing the computer out the window.

It must have understood the look on my face/read my mind, because after a restart it grudgingly gave up the document. But that was the last straw. After emailing the document to my several email accounts (the nonprofessional's version of "backing up") I decided it was time to replace the Gateway.

I have suffered from Indecisive Buyer's Syndrome (IBS) since girlhood. The most intense struggles usually took place at a rest stop familiar to my immediate family in Limon, Colorado. But the Gateway's previously mentioned terminal illness has been known to me for some time, and I knew I would need to replace it before final exams this semester. So, I'd done some thinking, made many consultations, and I Knew What I Had To Do. Still, the price tag on an apple product has a nonphysical weight of approximately 14 million pounds.

One beautiful, life-changing MacBook Air later, I have all but finished the brief.

The best parts of the brief were written by my brilliant moot court partner Jared. My parts, however, really aren't so bad.

Today, we print. Tomorrow, we party.

Also, unfortunately for Joey, tomorrow he has a scheduled minor surgery to remove a growth on his cheek. Luckily for Rachel, her mother is coming through town and can take him back to Abilene, and her father will drive him to and from the clinic.

Today I got an email from a professor. Professors, you ask? What are those? I had all but forgotten myself that technically the most important thing in my life is the 13-odd credit hours for which I WILL be graded. The professor in question is freshly returned from arguing before the Supreme Court, in a very non-moot way. His message? I have an assignment (sadly, quotations here are inappropriate). A law school first for me, and one I'm sure will cause me to continue putting my recent purchase (the beautiful, featherlight MacBook Air, if you somehow forgot about it, which I never will, because it cost more than any nonliving thing I've ever bought) to good use.

Back to real, graded and curved life for the next few months. I feel like I've been on a strange, stressful working vacation.