So, here it is, heading into the first round of finals for my 3L year. I know I've been out of touch, and for that I must apologize. Clinic took over my life, along with the general apathy and restlessness that the rest of the world knows as senioritis.
We're on day 2 of studying lockdown, and hour the third of actual studying. To be fair, I wasn't just screwing around before then, as you might expect. I found out yesterday that one of my clinic cases has a pleading due in four days....during my Criminal Procedure exam. So, I set to work. The past 48 hours have been a surreal, sleep deprived, stomach-clenchingly stressed out blur. I started writing a motion at noon yesterday. My partner and I had 15 pages by midnight. We spent all of today formatting, cleaning up citations. That is, until we discovered that we weren't entitled to the 12 pages we had the first go-round. Oh, no no. We had to get our justifications for why our motion shouldn't be straight up dismissed out in FIVE pages. Seriously, who the fuck can make any kind of persuasive and valid legal argument in five pages, when the first page is all but useless and you have six sections that are REQUIRED to be in the motion.
WHAT THE HELL ARE OUR COURTS THINKING?!?!? I get that no one wants to read 36 pages of pleadings plus the evidentiary support. No one gets that more than I do. I have previously failed to complete 11 page reading assignments, I truly empathize with your desire to do no more reading than is strictly necessary, but do you really want to read five pages that essentially regurgitate the same argument because there's no space for a new one? Yeah. Didn't think so.
Utter idiocy. Not to mention that I'm rapidly becoming disillusioned with the idea that lawyers working for the government actually do research. I mean, seriously, if you're gonna say an administrative rule is final, you had sure as hell fact check. No one who is an established attorney, and I mean NO ONE, wants to have some unpaid legal interns pointing out to the fucking court that they're just factually incorrect on a number of points. Especially when it says right out in the open, on the administration's website, that no final rule has been made. Get yo' facts straight.
Anyway, enough of that rant, and on to the next.
Our law school is a fairly new building. From the outside, and from all of the publicly accessible areas, it appears to be quite lush and modern. This, folks, is naught but visual trickery. A lot of the stuff was poorly thought out. One full side of the building, for example, is composed of GLASS. Great for when it is sunny outside, but cold; TERRIBLE FOR EVERY SINGLE OTHER TYPE OF WEATHER. It also makes interior temperature control a bitch.
And then we come to their most recent changes. They took away the (teeny tiny) offices of nearly every student organization, citing the need for additional faculty offices. There are next to no windows in the clinical law program office. AND they created this weird glass fishbowl space on the lower level of our bizarrely echo-y library to give students a space to congregate BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE ANY OTHER SPACES. I don't know about you, but I'd love to have a functional space over a pretty space every time. Clearly the dream is to have a space that is both functional and pretty, but here they've sacrificed one in favor of the other. I don't get what they were thinking, nor do I wish to speculate as to why they've made the choices they have. All I know is that we have to live with those choices. I mean, I get that they wanted the library to look modern and bright. Totally get that. Love bright, modern spaces. The problem is that putting thin berber carpet on top of concrete in a large space with a lot of glass and metal means that EVERY SOUND ECHOES because there is no insulation. That, friends, is how to best describe the noise situation in our library.
To be fair, I'm only noticing this now because the noisiest woman in the history of the universe is sitting at the table I'm attempting to study at. Seriously. Dry coughing like every 5 minutes (lozenge....she should get one), and then giggling to herself for NO REASON. Oh, and every time she either decides to study something else or just needs a break she goes into EVERY BAG SHE BROUGHT WITH HER and makes an ungodly amount of noise in the process before scampering off to do whatever it is that extremely noisy people do.
All of this may be symptomatic of the sheer number of hours I've spent in this stupid building with all of these stressed out (yet also inconsiderate) people over the last three to four months. Then again, it could be my naturally curmudgeonly nature eeking through. Either way, that girl should either invest in some tea with honey, a lozenge, or die a fiery death.
Le sigh. Time to get back to crim pro. The stress knot in my stomach and the muddled atmosphere of my brain call me back to it. Trust me, there will be more stress posts in my near future - I have an obscene number of rants saved up.
OHMYGOD WHY IS EVERYONE COUGHING?!?!?!?!? I"M JUST GOING TO BRING A VAT OF TEA WITH HONEY AND DISTRIBUTE IT TO ALL OF YOU HACKING DISEASE BASKETS.
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