Tuesday, October 04, 2005

I'm a 1000 Miles From Nowhere

And there is no place I'd rather be....

It becomes apparent midway through your 1st semester of law school that you will never be the same.

At first when you hear you will change you don't believe it. Even in the first few weeks you hold to the fact that you wont change. You still go out, get smashed like an undergrad, and have many friends that are willing to do the same right along with you.

Then day by day these things begin to slip.

The first thing to go is your concept of the weekend. In college it was Wed.-Sun. Now you just pray you get at least one night completely free. Getting lit up is usually a luxuary you can't afford because of the atrocious hangover that you weather all the next day. However, make no mistake that you still get wasted, but now you just know that you shouldn't. It will only take a day for you to realize why 1 out of 5 lawyers have an alcohol problem.

The next is your hoard of friends. Your relationship will change a bit like it or not. Lie to yourself if you want to, but it does. Your friends are not on the same page as you. You look at things differently. They can slam 5 beers faster than you can drink 1 and you are more drunk than they are after it. Believe me this is a good thing that they don't think like you. It is like drinking from a mountian stream after crossing the desert when nobody asks you for 24-hours what a Reasonable Person would do. Old friends are refreshing

The next step is your slip into Nowhere. Work is piling on from the Law School gods, what you thought you had a handle on at the beginning of the semester is slipping from your mind, the price of gas is 3 bucks a gallon, and finals are now in the somewhat distant horizon. You begin to doubt what you are doing is the right way to study. You find yourself lost in thought most of the time while walking around doing things. You can't fall asleep very well because you are again lost in thought. Conversations on the phone with your usual people becomes distant because half the time you are wishing you were reading torts and not chatting on the phone.

However, at least for me, I enjoy it. You have to take things day by day and week by week. Everyday will present itself with a unique challenge and it is up to you how to handle it. Everyday is an opportunity to do better, and everyday is another opportunity to do worse. If you let yourself drown without a fight, there will be no re-surfacing, but if you thrash hard enough, you may not lose sight of the daylight and emerge once again.

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