Spring break and the strike continues

Spring break has more or less started. I have one more class later today, but there was no reading and it’s not a very stressful class so I guess I’m almost officially on spring break.

So that’s good, I guess. It means we only have five more weeks of classes. But that means I have five weeks to get a paying summer job. That isn’t so good. (I sent out 13 resumes this week. That's something). And five weeks to get my ass in gear and um, you know, learn stuff.

This might sound a little strange, but I’m not really sure how hard I’ve been working this semester. I still compare everything to my first semester of law school and of course I have never come close to working as hard as I did in that first. I mean I’ve done all the reading and gone to every class this semester and held down a job (where my hours are slowly decreasing as the law firm seems on the verge of falling apart, but never mind that now) and done other law school things I have to do. And I’ve spent a lot of time looking for a job. So I fear I’ve done only the minimum to get by – my classes, except for State and Local Government - are stress-free and not that difficult or complicated, unlike last semester with Evidence, Civ Pro II and Business Associations.

Anyway, it seems that in each successive semester, I put in less work (although as I said, I think that might be a mirage because technically there was less work, but I’m also a much more efficient reader of cases and I have a much better sense of what is and isn’t important…I still remember the first couple of weeks of Civ Pro when I spent God knows how long reading every assignment because I tried to figure out the answer to every one of those practically unanswerable questions in the notes between cases…so fewer hours working doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve done less work). But at the same time, as I put in less work, my grades slowly went up. Who could have predicted that those two things would be inversely proportional to each other? It’s probably because the first semester of 1L year was so stressful that I had a lot of anxiety about it, and about my ability to make it through three years of law school. Now, the anxiety has turned to other subjects – will I get a job? Will it be a job I like, or at least don’t hate? Do I even want to be a lawyer? How do I get a job practicing law in one of the few areas of law that actually interest me? Remind me again why I went to law school? Oh yeah, wasn’t it because after the career you liked ended you had no passion for what you ended up doing and so you figured you’d go to law school because you could envision having a passion for some lawyer jobs? Who is the Bricklayer and what’s his deal? Why did I take my seminar instead of ADR, which I got into on the last drop/add day but was too lazy to go buy the book so I didn’t add it? Have I learned anything in law school? Has it really changed me, the way I saw myself changing during that first semester, or have I changed back? Can you believe this lasts three years?

So anyway, that’s that.

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Oh by the way, the “communication barrage” about the strike so far has consisted of two things. Yesterday I got an e-mail from a professor whose class I dropped before the semester even started saying class would be held in the “atrium” last night. Then another e-mail saying the “atrium” is the bricks because I guess students e-mailed asking where to find this atrium. In this e-mail, which was actually sent by the professor’s assistant, was a reminder to wear a jacket because it might be a little chilly at night. Seriously. Are we nine years old?

And, apparently, Dean Coker has started a blog about the strike. Not really sure where that’s going, but OK, so now the Dean has a blog. That’s something, I guess, although there isn't much in the way of content yet so I'll reserve judgment.

Oh, and the good news is that the strike is moving to the medical school and the airport. More importantly, probably, is that this donor is withholding his $300,000 pledge until the administration caves. If a few more alumni had the guts to do that, this thing would be settled within the hour.