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.