Fell Off the Wagon

I had been doing really well with staying caught up on my class reading this semester. Better than I had all last year - even better than during the first few weeks of 1L fall, when I was pretty much just overwhelmed. For the past four weeks, I'd done all my federal tax reading! All my neuroscience & the law reading! Even (okay, almost) all my insurance & public policy reading!

Then something happened. I don't know what it was. Probably the nine & counting straight weekends of traveling. Maybe the change in weather. Maybe the explosion of my inbox while I was in dialup-only internet access territory this past weekend. Maybe the realization that if I didn't do all my reading last year and it turned out okay, I probably don't need to do all my reading this year. Whatever it was, I hit the proverbial wall some time on Sunday/Monday and just decided to take it easy this week. Inevitably, that means I won't probably ever get back to my studious start-of-semester self, but that's fine with me.

Sometimes - like yesterday morning at 9:05am as I sat bleary-eyed and dreadfully in need of caffeine near the back of Federal Income Tax - I see the eager to please transfer students with their perfectly organized binders of printed case briefs and think, "Wow, they are so on top of it - if they can do it, surely I can do my reading and show up to class prepared, too." Then I snap back to reality, where the transfers largely come from schools where it's expected that you brief cases ahead of time and be ready to answer grueling Socratic questions or else you won't stand out and be impressive and get the teacher recommendations that you need to do xyz... And I sort of pity them because, well, as I look around the room, nobody except the transfers (including the 3Ls who transferred last year...I guess old habits die hard?) seems to have case briefs neatly organized in a binder.

I don't really want to venture a guess as to what that says about the rest of us, who don't have 100% perfect attendance and sometimes beg off answering when called upon. We were raised by the law school equivalent of wolves? We generally feel like we have more important things to do than prepare for class? We're just not morning people? I don't really know. But it makes me feel better not to be the only one who's quickly and relatively shamelessly fallen off the wagon.

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