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.