I'm in a conference room in one of the law school buildings, accompanied by no more than my laptop, Property book, a hundred pages of cases for my open memo, and the low hum of the lights above, for two reasons: one, One-Armed Maggie suggested I scope out a place where I could study and not freak out a la my recent library excursions; and two, my 24-year-old hallmate told me that he was not inviting me to the library to study with him anymore because "all we do when we study is screw around." It's fun, he hastily added, but he needed to get work done.

Humph.

Well, this is not the library and I just got a useful hour's work of reading done but I can just feel that this open memo is not going to happen tonight.

No! It will get done, dammit. It's a freakin' non-graded class, for heaven's sake, and I will rap out another draft tonight if it kills me.

Got called on in my Civil Procedure class today. Some hypotheticals about Rule 19 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. I knew a couple answers, and just flat-out gave up on the others: "I don't remember." "I'm not sure." "I don't know." Yeah. I was awesome all right.

I'm not so concerned about the embarrassment factor because I am so tired, but I am a little concerned about how much I don't know about Civil Procedure. Have I mentioned that I'm not sleeping well? I wake up after 5 hours or so and fall asleep only fitfully for an hour or two after. Every morning there are big dark circles under my eyes, and I think, "Damn. I'm too old for this crap. This crap is making me age faster. Wait. Which is it? Ehhhhh."

One redeeming moment about Civil Procedure today -- we went over the practice exam and I think I hit most of the major points, enough to collect my B and go home. This uplifting moment was somewhat deflated by the fact that I took twice as long to do the practice exam as was allotted, and the practice exam question was "a little easier" than the exam will be. Thanks, professor.

Oh, and for the non sequitur record: the thought winged by earlier as I read property laws about marriage and how to split up property in divorce -- this will never be me. It will never be me because I am going to be alone forever while my friends get married and live happily ever after. And I will definitely be eaten by Alsatiens. A pack of them.

Lovely.

Tired. Would like to sleep now... will work for an hour on this memo and go back to the dorm.

I had such great ambitions for Thanksgiving break, but accomplished only about 1/5 of what I hoped for. Oh well. The hall was very quiet and actually very pleasant. Amazing what happens when you have only seven people -- and all quiet ones -- in a space usually occupied by 18.

I finished up my subciting so that was an accomplishment. Made some money editing for a professor in Korea I did some work for when I was there. Watched a movie for my reading group, went to the gym, read some Contracts for this week. And that was pretty much it for the four days. I really should have done my open memo (practice for when you're an associate at a law firm) and my Contracts practice exam (for which I should really review Contracts) and looked for jobs, but it was not meant to be, cherie.

And now, only three weeks left! Of classes, that is, and then a few weeks of "break" during which we'll all be studying and applying for summer jobs, and then exams on Jan. 7, 9 and 12. Not long now, and I suspect it'll fly by. My god, I can't wait for this semester to be over. I can't remember a time where I had so much work to do and all of it boring and most of it very hard to understand.

I'm vaguely feeling okay about schoolwork right now -- I do reading in the mornings and in between classes -- but I'm worried about hunting for jobs (just heard someone say that they've got 125 firms lined up to apply for) and not being able to study efficiently at big bro's apartment. I should have gotten a ticket to come back earlier, I think, so I'd be forced to study. To tell the truth, except for some blue moments at the undergrad library (it seems that the allergy I've picked up here is not just restricted to the law library) and on Thanksgiving day, I enjoyed hanging out with the kids in the hall.

On the other hand, this place is going to be a stress center come late December, when some people are planning to come back, and since I absorb stress like a sponge, I'm probably better off hanging in Cali and emailing people for help. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Okay, it's now midnight and I have gotten very little work done on this open memo. Back to work. Just for an hour.

Had a fine Thanksgiving meal with the Mormons yesterday. Two men in my section are Mormons; one is married with two children, and one is just married. Another non-Mormon student and I went over to the former's house, and had salad, stuffing containing two sticks of butter, twice-baked potatoes, honey-baked turkey from the store, and four kinds of pie. Then we played Taboo, Pictionary, and Guess-tures (a charades-type game). It was a nice time. I went over to the kidless Mormon's house afterwards and played video games. I got a video game headache afterwards.

It feels like a Sunday but it's Friday, and I'm sitting in one of the few libraries on campus that are open today. This is an undergraduate library, a nice five-level affair with beautiful burnt sienna chairs in the lounge area and Nordic-looking furniture. I'm at a desk by a window. The shade is half drawn. A flock of birds just flew by, making large shadows on the shade and reminding me that winter is approaching, and the birdies gone south.

Crimson City looks like a Hollywood set from here -- small streets and towers and iron details on red brick buildings. It's 12:30 in the afternoon and I haven't done any work since Wednesday, and not much then either. A balmy 60-degree day took me by surprise yesterday, but a chill wind blew in and the temperature dropped to a staggering 26 degrees by late evening. It's chilly today too, but not hat-and-gloves weather yet.

I've nothing much to complain about: the campus is blessedly emptied out for the holiday, leaching stress out of the atmosphere if not the body, and the sun is shining, albeit on its way down. It's terribly depressing to have the sun set at 4:30 every day. I don't know how the denizens live here.

I haven't talked to any family members or far-off friends yet for the holiday -- got some calls yesterday but couldn't reach them when I called back last night. It's okay. I don't exactly miss them; I don't really want to even talk to my folks in Washington. There are a couple people in the hall for the weekend too, and I hung out with them last night and this morning. They're my favorite people in the hall, so I'm glad they're here too. But I've got a strange feeling inside. When you're one of many, you feel like you could disappear and no one would notice. You know that feeling, don't you?

I'm in no danger of disappearing. No, I'm sitting here in a quiet undergraduate library with blonde Scandinavian wood furniture and sleek retro lamps. Church bells are ringing somewhere, and birds flying by, and it's very quiet in this library. I haven't disappeared. I'm sitting here, as real as could be. Yes, I'm here. I know I am.

Feeling oddly nihilistic today.

Hm. I wrote that and then realized I didn't really know what nihilistic meant, so I looked it up:

In philosophy:
- An extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence.
- A doctrine holding that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.
- Rejection of all distinctions in moral or religious value and a willingness to repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief.
- The belief that destruction of existing political or social institutions is necessary for future improvement.

Nihilism: A diffuse, revolutionary movement of mid 19th-century Russia that scorned authority and tradition and believed in reason, materialism, and radical change in society and government through terrorism and assassination.

In psychiatry: A delusion, experienced in some mental disorders, that the world or one's mind, body, or self does not exist.

Huh. Okay, maybe I'm just feeling a little detached.

Today I went to my contracts class, ate lunch, frantically read for my civil procedure class, went to civil procedure class, went to a section meeting featuring Mary Bonauto (the head lawyer for the Massachusetts gay marriage case), went to a panel on the future of race relations moderated by Lani Guinier and featuring Derrick Bell and Sheryl Cashin. Then wasted time for an hour listening to Haydn and Bach. Watched "Retrosexual 80s" on MTV. Went to the gym. And now I'm in my room. Not reading.

I think it's the music that did it. I listened to very little music in the past couple years, and listening it to it now seems to pull me into a strange funk. It's not all music -- I'm listening to the soundtrack to "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" now and it's fine. No, it seems to be classical music, though I heard Coldplay on the radio at the gym and felt a odd disconnect as I flashbacked to walking around Olympic Park in Seoul every day listening to the "Rush of Blood to the Head" CD, trying to get over my breakup.

Anyway. I heard something today that cut to the chase of something that really bothers me about law school. I was sitting in the library reading my civil procedure book and I overheard someone complaining about a friend who'd written her an email: "Yeah," this student said, "She wrote, 'Well, you haven't called and you can't be that busy, so just drop me an email.'" The student walking beside her said, "Anybody who says you can't be that busy hasn't been a law student."

Busy, yes. THAT busy? Yeah, sometimes. Even when you're goofing off, there's always a spectre of readings to come hanging over your head, or the vague thought that you should be looking for a summer job, or going to a talk by one of the 15 famous bigwigs that come through this school every DAY. And when you're a corporate lawyer? THAT busy again. All the time. I still haven't spoken to my corporate lawyer friends in New York, and it's been three months since I got back from Korea. I was an usher at their wedding, and I haven't talked to them since their wedding, because they're busy and I'm busy and what time we have is spent trying to recoup energy.

The thing is, what is it that we're doing that's so urgent, so important, so much more crucial than everyone else's work? Yeah, we're busy. Busier than our friends in other fields, maybe. But why? Why is there so much work, and why is it more important to do that work than to call our friends? Why do we trudge through this school experience and then corporate jobs (and most law students do go to private firms in the first year out) to end up rationalizing to ourselves that "real life" begins at 40 and it's okay to be miserable til then? (Scroll down to the Nov. 15 entry -- the last paragraph before the Nov. 14 entry.)

I'm not articulating this well. There's just something that seems self-important, inflated somehow about law and how people view it. I've never been able to take things like business and making money and career advancement very seriously. I don't know why I should take law school seriously either. One of the Rhodes scholars in my section complained today, "It's so hard to remember this stuff when you have no interest in it whatsoever." What IS it that brings us all here, and keeps us here?

It's 12:20 am. I gotta go and sleep now, so I can wake up and review the reading for property. When you don't know what you're doing, you focus on the immediate tasks at hand.

The hell that is subciting

Subciting is a process that first year law students know well because they constitute the main slave labor force recruited by law journals to do this thankless task. Well, I shouldn’t say thankless – my editors did say thank you yesterday. But thanks is very poor recompense for the hours of precise fact checking and even more precise correction of proper citation format – hours that I will never get back and that I rue to the extreme.

And yet – this is my second time around on the subcite hellwheel – I did several pages for a prestigious journal on civil rights last month, which, incidentally, was the week before my first big freak out session. Just sayin’.

What subciting entails is this: you get several pages of a law journal article that is goingn to get published. You check to see that the text is properly attributed (often there are sentences that should be and aren’t), that the attributed stuff is actually in the place that the author says it is (if it is, great; if it isn’t, you start hunting throughout the doc), that the attributed stuff accurately reflects what’s in the source (sometimes requiring you to read entire cases), and that the citation is in the right format (harder than it sounds because the rules for formatting are so precise and often the sources you’re dealing with are not in your handy guide to formatting).

Bottom line: it sucks.

Why am I doing this again? Well, I dropped one of my other activities, so I felt like I had to do this one, and besides, it’s a concrete task that’s over in a defined period, and who knows, maybe there are some nice people on the journal, yadda yadda blippity boppity boo. So it is my own damn fault and believe me, I am putting myself in the doghouse for a long time for this. I can’t believe I’m doing this again.

What makes me really angry is that the authors for these law journal articles are so sloppy about their scholarship. In the article I’m fact checking and editing right now, there are three pages of stuff that isn’t in the source the author cites to. Just isn’t there. In one sentence on another page, the author writes about something that happened in last year and cites it to a source that came out in 2000.

And it’s not just the citing. A hallmate said that his article was full of paragraphs that, but for a few transposed phrases here and there, was lifted practically verbatim from the source. The same shit is going on in my article too. That stuff needs to be in quotes; you can’t pass off something as your own thought and just drop a casual footnote to make up for it. What’s the point, then? Why not just tell your readers to read the source you’re cribbing from? Scholarship is supposed to add something new to the debate, so why bother copying chunks of facts from someplace else?

Sloppy, sloppy. And the system allows it. It encourages it – why bother checking your footnotes if you know some 22-year-old law student is going to do it for free, and with a grin too, because if you want to get on a law journal, you have to subcite for that journal as a 1L. And everyone is on a journal.

I actually was not going to do this subciting crap, and I know at least one person who actually didn’t do it. Why did I get sucked in? Someone said to me: “You HAVE to do a journal.” And I thought, “Well, I should just do it and see how it is.” That was the first time. This time, I have no excuse. I’m just a glutton for punishment. I hate me.

I went to parties two nights in a row this weekend.

(That hk. Such an animal.)

The first was on Friday night. My school's traditional league rival (and my undergrad alma mater) beat us in a charity basketball game Friday evening, in overtime. No one really cared that much about the game, which was between the students. The highlight was the halftime, half-court game between faculty members at both schools. There's a famous criminal law professor in his 60s here, who talked it up in his classes, apparently, and provided many an amusing moment during the game. He was awful. The rest of our team was awful too, except for my legal writing class professor. So we lost, but considering that Rival School's team wasn't even all faculty members (they had some administrators and fellows in there), I don't think it was all that shameful.

What was shameful was the football game, which Rival Team lost 35-3, but we won't talk about that. (Confused? My allegiances lay with my law school during the law school b-ball game, but with my undergrad college during the football game. They just also happen to be league rivals. No, I don't think it's weird that I divide my loyalties this way. But I do think it sucks that "my" schools lost both games. Or all three, counting the faculty halftime game.)

Party! Yes, so back to that -- I didn't want to go, but my hallmate insisted I at least check it out, so I did. A hall full of drunk 22-year-olds is what I expected to find, and a hall full of drunk 22-year-olds is what was there. I drank a shot of Korean liquor at the "Korea" room of the crawl (or as we called in in college, the "Round the World.") I drank something green at the Irish room. I drank of cup of orange juice and grenadine (the vodka had run out) at some other room. I contemplated glugging out of the bottle of Stolichnaya at the Russian table. I stood with my hallmate and a couple other people, undecided for a few minutes. I remembered that I was 28 and old enough to leave situations I hate by myself. I left.

Headed back to the dorm, which was completely empty due to the popularity of the party, got into pyjamas, and turned on the TV in the common room. Watched a movie about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (played by Helena Bonham Carter, who in her early career was definitely on track to becoming "that medieval chick who always ends up getting her head chopped off"). And liked it. And then watched Cheers. And liked that too. In the middle somewhere, met another hallmate's friends from Rival College/my undergrad alma mater and turned down an offer to go to another party. Went to bed at 12:30.

An excellent Friday evening, even with the party.

Last night, I fielded a last minute request from June, in from Providence for the day, to accompany her to a Thanksgiving party. Lots of engineers and people with careers. No legal jokes. Not one strangely colored drink. Real plates. And loads and loads of food. Homemade cider, even.

I almost wept from the joy.

Thanksgiving is such a nice holiday -- no gifts, no costumes, no worries about finding someone to kiss at midnight. Just eating. And watching TV. And sleeping. Every holiday should be Thanksgiving.

Slightly more sane the past three days. Reading has been relatively light and comprehensible this week.

I still don't get why they teach us the way they do, which is to give us cases and then expect us to wring the precepts of law out of them. Well, I get that they're trying to teach us how to think. But it would be a lot easier if they provided us a roadmap first, especially considering that the vast, vast majority are not going to be out there creating brilliant new theories of law or whatever. We're just going to be applying what law there is. It seems silly to force all of us to do what is really academic thinking when 99 percent are not interested in becoming scholars. (Not to mention the Socratic method, which requires you to think on your feet a la trial attorneys, when most of the class will never try a case.)

It's annoying that reading the assigned material is the least efficient way to study.

What is it with Mondays? Just had another mini freak-out session, starting with reading in the library, being bored to tears (nearly literally), and having to leave because I just couldn't sit there anymore staring at a case I didn't care about, reading words I didn't understand, feeling like I'd never finish and even if I did, that there was an endless number of cases to read in other classes.

This is after a weekend of "taking care of myself" by taking Friday and Saturday afternoons and evenings off to meet friends and read a novel, after getting 9 hours of sleep both those nights (and 8 last night), after going to the gym both Saturday and Sunday.

Called One-Armed Maggie this time, and she reiterated the words of Miss D: read the outline, figure out the holding of the cases, don't worry if you can't read everything. Miss D, by the way, alarmed by my freakiness, called me this weekend in a gesture of great sweetness and mercy to try to reinstate my sanity. I'm embarrassed to say that I wasn't able to keep her wise words in mind for more than a few days before having another panic attack. I'm a slow learner, Miss D! I'm sorry!

Recurring panic attacks, feeling like I want to cry everytime I look at a textbook, inability to relax, a decrease in patience and forbearing -- is this normal? The scary thing is that I think it might be. A little on the extreme side, but... for example -- I overheard someone walking by my door last week say, "I HATE law school. I'm tired of never getting enough sleep. I'm tired of always feeling behind. I'm tired of always feeling like I need to read. I'm just sick of it." And yesterday. The kid in the hall who was super proud to come to this law school and wants to be a lawyer and is actually on top of his work? He confessed to looking up tuition refund policies online, to see how much he could get back if he dropped out now.

Why is it like this? Why do they assign so much reading when there isn't nearly enough time to absorb it and think about it and put in into a larger framework? Why does this have to be so hard and stressful and hateful? What purpose could it serve? Someone suggested that it was to weed people out. Why? The more alumni, the more donations.

I was going to go to a summer jobs presentation tonight, and a lecture on the alternative dispute resolution they are using in the case of Rwanda, but I am skipping these things to attend a prior commitment at the Crimson Club in town. Someone is going to speak about the "unconscious nature of assessments of self and others that reflect unintended effects of social group membership (such as age, race/ethnicity, gender, and class)," which basically means that we all hold biases and prejudices about others, and those biases and prejudices affect how we behave individually and our social structures. The relationship with law is, I hope, obvious.

Miss D, One-Armed Maggie, and the student career advisor I saw last week all said to take time to do stuff I want to do, so damn all if I'm not gonna take that fine advice.

And then I'll come back and read. And attempt not to freak out.

Damn, I hate this place.

Still snowing. Un-f**kin'-believable.

Snowing. Bloody snowing on Nov. 12. Lovely.

Been having a downer of a week, actually, what with panic attack on Monday, turning a shit memo on Thursday morning, and so on. Skipped class this morning for no particular reason at all. I woke up on time (going to sleep at 10 pm helps), read the assignment for today, and just... didn't go.

Did manage to make it to mediation for the first time, and, despite misgivings about not being ready, did my first mediation. It was not a success. Lots of beginner-mediator mistakes: spending way too much time on parsing out the minutiae of the problem, letting one party talk only to us and not encouraging him to talk to the other party. The parties were both hard to understand due to language problems and a speech impediment. It was like, "all problems, all the time!"

Even though it was unsuccessful, though, I felt a lot better after. Just feeling I tried to help someone was uplifting. Even though ultimately I didn't.

This was not the way I felt after meeting with a professor yesterday morning at 10:30. I confessed that I was feeling discouraged this week about law school and it being the right path for me, and he talked my ear off about options and the different things you can do as a lawyer, and he was trying to be nice and solution-y, but it just left me depressed. "Just take classes in what you're interested in," he said. And what am I interested in again?

My 3 pm meeting with a student career advisor (they tell us to have these meetings in order to figure out summer plans summer plans! in November! f***!) was a little better. She advised me to drop a couple activities, which sounded like and probably is the solution to a lot of the stress, but then, at the 4:30 team meeting for the legal aid group I'm a part of, there was a case involving someone who doesn't speak English very well, just Korean, so I had to volunteer for that... I was all set to drop mediation too, but then this morning was very uplifting, and so... well, I'm apparently just too eager to screw myself over. And over.

Really, if these classes were not in the way, I might be having a good time at law school.

But the classes. Ah, the classes. The reading that leaves me cold. The cold-calling that only serves to make most people feel stupid. The logic-based thinking that is so prized. Admittedly I am pretty down about law and life this week, but I have never felt any appeal from the stuff I'm learning. It's boring, okay? Freakin' boring as shit. Actually, shit might be more interesting -- it's got texture and odor and changes depending on who/what is defecating and what's been eaten. In the stuff we read, all texture and odor and sound -- in short, the humanity -- has been excised, leaving us with convoluted legal reasoning. Which usually is badly written. I hate it. I hate it.

And now, the cold dreary winter has begun. Once it's snowed, you can't go back. Tonight's forecast: cold and dismal. The next two and a half years: more of the same.

It is 1:30 am on Wednesday night and there is a poker tournament going on right outside my door.

Kill. Kill. Kill.

Freaked OUT yesterday in the most high drama yet private way -- stumbled/fell out of the dorm and walked along the street crying, hyperventilating. and muttering to myself, "Calm DOWN calm down calm down." This was after sitting in the library for the first time since last Wednesday and realizing that I had no idea how to research this memo due Thursday, deciding instead to read property (two days behind in the reading and soon to be three), and then staring at the material on the page and being wholly unable to comprehend it. So I threw my stuff in my backpack and went outside, where it was SNOWING, which was beautiful in its way, but also incomprehensible (it was November 8, for crying out loud). I made the unfortunate error of seeking help from a hallmate, who was completely unhelpful, and then the aforementioned freak-out began.

Basket case!

Fortunately, BC came to the rescue telephonically, reminding me that it is a stressful place and time, but that I would be more than all right. (But if there's no spoon, how do I eat my oatmeal?)

I went to bed at 11 last night and got up this morning at 8 am, and I'm still tired, but less freaked out. I haven't been getting enough sleep lately (like, 5-6 hours a night), and I need to correct that. My dad coming to town this weekend disrupted my plans for catching up on work, and when life is a delicate balancing act of getting just the right amount of reading done at just the right hours, a lost weekend can be catastrophic. When I say that I'm two classes behind in reading, I'm talking about six hours of work (soon to be nine!) that I need to eventually do, and with the amount of work in other classes, finding the six hours to do what I should have done last week is a tough gig.

I'm not complaining -- okay, yes I am. I'm not whining about it, though (I think). When they say law school is hard, it's partly this time crunch they're talking about, as well as some of the material (incomprehensible and boring).

Sigh.

That perspective thing I gained last week from listening to Chopin? It was nice, but some narrow vision would be more helpful at this point.

Mad whirlwind of activity the past couple weeks, with Double M here for some research during the last week of October, then the election and a draining and completely bullshit activity called subciting that I was too weak to resist taking part of, and finally this weekend my dad was here. I have done no work for classes since Wednesday of last week. I have a memo due Thursday I have not started. I am screwed.

So Double M went to class with me a week an a half ago, the one with the most amusing and most disorganized professor, and she liked it. I remember visiting law school classes and thinking they were interesting. Somehow it all changes when you have 30 pages of reading for each class and it takes an hour to read 10 pages. Interesting -- mildly. Fun -- no.

I voted last Tuesday and then stayed in the library all day checking the footnotes for an article in one of the law journals on campus -- this was partly because the checking (subciting) was taking so long, but also because I just didn't want to be sitting through the blow-by-blow, and biting my nails all the way through. I went back to the dorm when the library closed at midnight and found Kerry losing. So. De. Press. Ing.

Then I woke up Wednesday morning and thought, "Oh, what a beautiful fall morning!" And then remembered and thought, "Oh NO."

While the results were not quite finalized, I had a thought during my morning contracts class -- I am just sick of Bush. Yes, I disagree with his politics and policies domestic and international, and think he has nearly singlehandedly ruined my country's relationship with the rest of the free world (a world that supported us and cried with us in November of 2001) -- but that morning last week I just thought, "Please, go away. I'm tired of your smirks and your mugs and your old boy guffawing and back thumping. I'm tired of the media making fun of your smirks and mugs and old boy guffawing and back thumping. I'm tired of your malapropisms, and even more tired of everyone snickering about them. I'm tired of your rolling back social policy 30 years and tired of your opponents rolling over, whimpering, exposing their necks to your strange, hypno-toad-like ability to alpha-dog everyone into agreeing. I'm tired of reports about how many vacation days you take, and how many hours you work a day. I'm tired of your daughters. (As a salon.com reader pointed out, they are the same age as many of the soldiers who are dying or in danger of dying in Iraq -- could they comport themselves with a little more dignity?) I'm tired of Laura Bush's Stepford hair and frozen grin ('cause you know, who didn't love watching Hillary transform from hair-banded, bespectacled wonk nerd to highlighted Oprah-style, two-Z-formation-snaps sub-Prez?). I'm tired of stifling my gag reflex when I hear you and your staff trying to gloss over failures and mistakes. And I'm tired of being afraid. I'm afraid that because of your policies, Pax Americana is over, and a global division between Christianity and Islam is again in the making. I'm afraid that we can never repair the damage done to our relationships with our allies. I'm afraid that there is something terrible coming up the pipe."

My musings on this subject were broken when someone, before answering a question, announced in class that Kerry had conceded. The professor asked him, "Wait, how do you know that?" The student smiled innocently: "The internet."

So there was a general feeling of depression around campus on Wednesday of last week, and Thursday as well, which contrasted with the week before, with euphoria of the Red Sox winning. On the whole, I think switching the outcomes would have been preferable. What's another year when it's already been 86? But no one asked me.

On an entirely different topic: on Thursday night, per my request, a hallmate who'd majored in music played a couple pieces for me in a music building practice room. It was a little odd. The scenario, I mean, and also my reaction to it. I've never heard a concert-level pianist in such close proximity before (the practice rooms have a piano in them, and little else). I also haven't listened to live music in general for a long time. And so I sat there, occasionally closing my eyes and leaning my head back, mostly watching my friend's hands move in strange and wonderful ways across the keyboard, and remembering, slowly, that there are more things to life than statutes of fraud and rules of formal realizability and how to establish jurisdiction. It's good that I've gotten so steeped in law school classes and campus life, but it's not a joyful sort of experience. It's a good experience -- I feel myself getting smarter, gaining knowledge -- but that's a kind of a satisfaction born of hard work. Different from joy.

It was raining that night, but I took a walk with my friend after the music building closed, and I felt something shift back into place. I guess you could call it perspective.

That was Thursday night, and on Friday night my dad arrived in town, on just a few days notice to me. I should have been catching up on property reading, and starting my memo, and reviewing rules of jurisdiction this weekend, but instead, I slept in the car as my dad drove to New York to see the site of a future Buddhist college, then slept some more as we drove to a temple with female nuns. That was Saturday. Yesterday we went to the Zen Center of Crimson City, and then a very strange Zen martial arts center. And then, because one can only expose oneself to peace and tranquility and mental discipline so much, we went to Target. And then to dinner, where we shared a bottle of soju. And then had a cigarette a piece. You know what they say about families who drink and smoke together...

I got back about an hour ago from the airport, where my dad, with his inexplicable charm, totally cut in front of this woman at the counter and got himself ticketed before the 50 other people in line, and got a smile and a laugh out of the woman whom he cut off. It's amazing. I'm going to miss him.

As a law student, I live in a very insulated world, but I managed to get things in order enough to get myself registered to vote in this here state, and I actually went out to my polling station a few minutes ago and voted.

Crimson City has a simple ballot. No punching or butterflying or any of that crap. You take the ballot into one of several booths covered by a red, white and blue tarp over the top, and it's just you, a black felt pen, and a friendly diagram showing you how to correctly fill in the bubble. (You can request up to three more ballots if you make a mistake.)

Last time I voted, it was in DC, and the line snaked up and down the stairs and out of the doors of the church serving as the polling station for my neighborhood. But today, there was no wait at all. I followed the directions I copied down from Mapquest to the elementary school I didn't know was nearby, went past a couple volunteers doing exit polls, and down the steps to the basement. A nice policeman asked me at the door what my ward and precinct were, and then it was just a matter of showing my voting notice and checking in.

I have to say, I smiled when I saw those red, white and blue cloths over the voting booths. All the recent South Park-Team America anti-vote pretend blase is funny ("It's a choice between a douchebag and a shit sandwich!"), and I can even understand it to a certain extent, but when it comes down to it, it's cool to vote. You go to the centers of the neighborhood, the underpinnings of local American life, and you have your little say in who gets to represent you to the rest of the state, the country, and the world.

I wish I'd volunteered to monitor polls or something in some swing state (preferably somewhere nice and warm and sunny). I do think this is a really important election, and it would have been nice to feel that I'd done something to make it a fair one. Of course, there are so many ways in which it's not fair (besides the incredible charges of voter fraud, there's that whole matter of the electoral college -- why is it that it's possible to get a majority of people to choose you and not win? Why? And why it is that my vote is less important than someone's vote in Iowa or New Mexico? And why are district lines drawn by legislatures, which are political creatures?), you could say that it's a hopeless endeavor. But as Minnie Driver says in Grosse Point Blank, "Ya gotta try. It's your DUTY." And as someone in my hall pointed out, "If I knew everything was done fair and square, and my party didn't win, I'd be okay with it, because I'd know that's what people in this country wanted. That's what a democracy is, people."

Happy voting, all.